Giving Extras
by whitehound
Summary: Post DH fic.  He was sure he was going to die.  He was sure he had died.  Only somebody seemed to have decided to give him a new lease of life he hadn't asked for.  Follows on from Flower Remedy and examines Snape's memories in detail.
1. Prologue  Flower Remedy

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**PROLOGUE:**

"Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers." From _The Naval Treaty_ by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

When we learned of Snape's apparent death in _Deathly Hallows_ my immediate reaction was to write a strange little 100-word drabble called _Flower Remedy_, which was posted separately, in which - under circumstances which are never fully explained - Hermione and Ron are using an ancient magic to bring him back to life.

I actually have mixed feelings about this. Part of me just keeps on saying he's dead, he's dead, it hurts almost as much as real life bereavements; and since I can't restore life to the friends I've lost in real life, giving life again to this fictional friend is almost as painful as losing him - a reminder that in reality we have no such magic. And in any case if one wants to restore Snape, we have plenty of scope to assume he simply didn't die: there's nothing in his "final" moments as described to say whether he's dead or merely unconscious, no mention of him later among the Headmasters' portraits or among the dead laid out in the Great Hall, and Harry's later reference to him in the past tense could simply mean he hadn't seen him for years. There's plenty of scope for a timely arrival by Aberforth to have saved him.

Nevertheless, it was this story, _Flower Remedy_, in which he is truly dead and then isn't, which clamoured to be written and which then demanded that I expand it into a full multi-part story, explain what was going on in the drabble and what happened to him next. I could simply have taken the drabble and added new chapters to it, but I was afraid that since that meant it wouldn't generate a New Story alert, some people who had already read the drabble would miss seeing the expanded version. In any case, I like it just as a drabble, as it is, as well as as the intro. to a longer fanfic.: even though it's already been slightly canon-shafted, because Hermione was supposed to be there as a research healer, and JK's post-DH revelation that Hermione becomes a lawyer has had to be fudged around.

This, then, is the drabble which started it all.

* * *

**FLOWER REMEDY**

"It's only possible because we have his somatic memory at the point of death. Gwydion made Blodeuwedd's body entirely from flowers but it's a bit more... metaphorical for a man."

"Blodeuwedd was the one who killed her husband?"

"And was Transfigured into an owl, yes. The best post owls descend from her." Raising her wand, she began the incantation.

"I have transfigured you a body out of stones and flowers... what?"

Ron gave her a wall-eyed look. "Isn't that a bit - well - nancy for Snape?"

"It didn't say _which_ stones and flowers, so I used flint and deadly nightshade."

* * *

**Author's note:**

"Granite and deadly nightshade" would actually have had a better ring to it, but I though flint was the more appropriate stone - since it is not only hard but sharp, and it strikes fire.

Gwydion is a famous wizard who appears in the body of early Mediaeval Welsh tales called the Mabinogion. He makes a woman called Blodeuwedd out of flowers, so that she may wed his nephew Lleu, who has been cursed to marry no human woman. Blodeuwedd however falls in love with someone else, and she and her lover trick Lleu and kill him. Being magic himself he doesn't die but changes into a wounded eagle which is later restored to human form, and Gwydion punishes Blodeuwedd by turning her into an owl.

"Stones" is of course old-fashioned, rural slang for testicles.

For those readers who are waiting for updates to _Sons of Prophecy_ and _Lost and Found_, please note that these stories have not been and will not be abandoned, but are on temporary hiatus while I work out whether I can tweak _Sons of Prophecy_ and its predecessor, _Mood Music_, to make Snape's background compatible with the new canon revealed in _Deathly Hallows_. _Lost and Found_ however will have to remain canon-shafted, as well as AU, because **Dyce** and I have simply made Albus too nice in comparison with what we now know...


	2. 01 Coil and Recoil

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**1: COIL AND RECOIL**

Minerva's words burned like a brand - coward, coward and she would never know, as Lily had never known, that he had tried to save her. He would go to his death with her scalding contempt for company, as he had Lily's, and she would never see that he had fled rather than fire even the mildest of hexes at an elderly woman he had once called friend, and who had already spent time in St Mungo's with spell damage. He would die with Filius's hatred and none of them would know that he did it to save them, unless Hagrid or Aberforth survived to tell them - and how likely was that?

And die here he certainly would. Here, on the same cursed spot where he had seen the werewolf - and how much less painful it would all have been if James had simply let Remus eat him, he could have died at fifteen and never been the cause of another's death. He had tried, was trying, to get permission to leave the Shrieking Shack so he could send his Patronus - _her_ Patronus - to the sainted brat but as the thing which had once been Tom Riddle paced the moonlit room, speaking in his high, ridiculous, girly little voice about a wand which would not answer him, Severus knew his own doom.

He had had a year to work it out, after all. The mastery of the Elder Wand should indeed have come to him but Draco, the little fool, had been there before him. He could not say "Draco is the Wand's master, my Lord", even if he would, because his Vow to Narcissa would kill him but he could have said something else, he could have claimed that Hennessy had disarmed Dumbledore and that the Wand answered to whichever Order member had killed Hennessy that night. He could have saved himself, probably - Tom was taking time to work himself up to the murder and he should be flattered not to be killed completely out of hand but if he said anything, if he let Tom know by word or deed that he was not the Wand's master, then Tom would be forewarned. Far better to send Lily's murderer into battle with a weapon which he thought was his but which answered to another hand, perhaps even to Potter's hand, since Potter had in some sense defeated Draco. Certainly not to Tom's.

If only he had kept his mouth shut in front of Tom, all those years ago, Lily would have lived. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut now and let himself be killed, and Lily's killer would walk into battle with a weapon he could not command.

But oh, God, he was frightened. Minerva's contempt and his own terror coiled in his belly and turned his guts to ice and slime, twisting like the great snake in its bag of stars; he wouldn't give Tom the information which might save both of them, he _wouldn't_, but he couldn't keep from stammering in his terror, he could hear his own voice, incontinent, shaming, pleading and for a moment as the Wand waved and nothing happened he thought he was reprieved, that by some chance he really was the thing's master and it would not fire on him and then Nagini was on him, that horrible muscular length was about his face, her coils against his lips as he staggered back, screaming, shamed by fear as pain and fire lanced into the side of his neck and he fell with the snake still suffocating him, tearing at him -

And then Nagini was gone, Tom fucking Taradiddle and his stupid little reedy voice was gone and he was alone, alone in the house of the wolf with his life running out between his fingers, trembling in shock and fear as he tried to keep the red life inside his veins - tried _in_ vain, fuckit, he could feel the venom coursing through him and he was going to die here, he had dropped his wand, if he could find his wand in the half dark he could send Potter one last Patronus, instructions to send Lily's brat to his own death but at least then he would have done his duty, he would not deserve so much of Minerva's contempt, and then the boy was there, somehow, melting out of thin air to gaze at him in shock and God, please God, let the brat do as he was told just this once, just this _once_...

By a last supreme effort of the will which he had never lacked, non-verbal, wandless, he sent his memories gushing out with his blood, all the carefully-selected information which Potter would need but also key memories of _her_, the last confession he would never now make to the priest, how he had loved her, how he had betrayed her, how he had earned her contempt and her son's... As the emotional clarity of the memory of Lily's pitiless contempt flowed away from him, leaving only an outline of itself, something in him eased and he could allow himself a grim moment of pride as the brat and the other brat, Granger, Granger who was Muggleborn-brilliant-Lily-not-for-him-never-for-him obeyed him at last, as they caught his memories in a flask of magic and moonshine and he knew that he had lived alone and was dying as he had lived, without help or hope of reward but he had done his duty, and that nihilistic streak of dark romanticism which had led him down troubled paths to begin with was oddly content to die an unknown soldier, unheralded and unrewarded, known only to the dead.

As the last of the memories flowed out of him, mingled with his blood, he clutched at the boy's robes with one last order, one last plea, look at me, look at me so I can fall asleep looking at her eyes and, God, the boy did as he was told, the room was fading to grey, the pain was fading with it and he was flat on his back on the hard floor of the wolf's house and he was dying but there at last were Lily's eyes - Lily's wonderful leaf-green eyes which had burned with hatred and contempt of him for six scarifying years of the boy's schooling - and there was nothing in them but a kind and puzzled concern, they could have been her eyes when they were both little, before it all went so horribly wrong, although the hideous NHS spectacles were an unexpected hurdle...

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

...there was a sense that something very large which was inside his head, or which was in some sense behind him, had just been folded up small and stowed away where he would henceforth only be able to access it with conscious effort...

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

He was flat on his back on something cold and unyielding, and he had just time to realize that he was mother-naked before somebody pinched the bridge of his nose, hard. He opened his mouth on a yelp of indignant protest and somebody else tipped a choking great slosh of liquid into his mouth and then clamped his jaw shut, forcing him to swallow what his taste-buds automatically recognized, through long practice born of far too many spells in the hospital wing, as Blood-Replenishing Potion.

As the world swam around him and began to fall back into focus fire and agony blazed into being where Nagini had bitten him. He struggled to speak, to demand to know what the hell they - who? - thought they were doing handling him like this although a dim vestige of common-sense at the back of his brain told him that saying "Don't you know I'm the Headmaster?" while he was stark bollock naked was going to make him sound like a wanker (and in any case it wasn't true, it wasn't true, Minerva had driven him out to die with her scorn ringing in his ears); but the choking undignified process was simply repeated, this time with - some sort of anti-venin? - and then again with more Blood-Replenishing Potion. Then somebody's careful fingers were binding a pad of something firmly against the side of his neck, the pain began to ebb away under her hand and a kind, motherly-sounding female voice (why did he somehow expect it to be shriller than that?) said "Professor Snape - Severus - it's all right. We're just going to move you to a bed, now."

And he was floating, flailing, the hard surface under him had disappeared and he was insecurely, embarrassingly stranded in mid-air and then his hip hit the soft surface of a bed and a woman's arms came around him, supporting, comforting and something inside him twisted and broke and he was miserably, horribly sick all over her, and himself.

As he heaved and retched, scrabbling for support, he saw his own arm, and the splash of burn-scar across his wrist was still there but the Dark Mark somehow wasn't - did that mean that Potter had succeeded, that he had taken Tom down into death with him? - but as he watched, dazzled, his flesh faded to translucency, and a fine dapple which somehow looked like a cloud of bell-shaped flowers pulsed in and out beneath his skin and back to solidity again as another wave of nausea wrenched at his gut.

When he had nothing left to throw up with, the motherly-seeming woman drew him close and patted his back as the dry, painful spasms eased away. His cheek was resting on her shoulder and he realized that beyond her he could see a man-length altar of black stone, scattered with more of the bell-like flowers - belladonnas, he realized suddenly - behind which a tall, gangly, vaguely familiar red-headed man of about his own age was watching his embarrassing spasms with an expression which clearly said "Eww..." He thought he recognized what hand had held his jaw shut and forced him to swallow.

A second female voice, placidly competent, said _"Tergeo"_ and the revolting evidence was wiped away. Still feeling horribly grey and wobbly, he looked around for the source of the new voice and saw - good God. There was no mistaking her, from the dreamy, slightly protuberant eyes to the peculiar dress-sense, but when did Luna Lovegood get so thick in the body, her hair cut short and straight and boyish and the fine beginnings of crow's feet wrinkling the corners of her eyes? She looked scarcely any younger than he was. Confused and frightened, he pushed himself away from the motherly woman and for the first time really looked at her, properly - to find himself confronting a similarly aged Hermione Granger.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The thing in the back of his head unfolded briefly, like origami, and there was a sense of - not time, time wasn't the right word, but _something_ had passed, and now there was once more time, but different time -

"I was dead," he said, frowning. "Why aren't I dead?"

Suddenly-thirty-something Lovegood (was she still Lovegood?) tweaked the sheets up to cover his embarrassment (at least, that was one word for it) and then perched herself comfortably on the end of his bed. "It's like this, you see. I was doing some research - I'm a research naturalist now, you know." Severus raised his eyebrows but forbore to comment - he could only imagine what kinds of nonsensical creatures she was studying. "I was working with owls, trying to breed back to the bloodline of Blodeuwedd - you know about Blodeuwedd?"

"She wants to be flowers but you make her owls," he whispered, swallowing. Lovegood gave him a slightly blank look but Granger (? was she still Granger?) nodded approvingly, recognizing the reference.

"That's right."

"But I was always owls..." _(clawing, screaming, full of rage)_ -

"Not any more," Lovegood said calmly. "Hermione did some research for me - she works in Magical Law Enforcement - and she turned up a document trail which led us to the original spells Gwydion used to create Blodeuwedd. And, well, we found out how to make up a new body for you using flowers and stones and a lot of - well, it was all a bit - ritual."

"Which explains the altar." He clutched at the bed, feeling light-headed, and maybe-Granger gripped his shoulder to steady him and handed him a glass of water which he knocked back in one, although raising his head made the wound in his neck pulse unpleasantly. "My sex life may never have amounted to much, but I'm not quite qualified to be a virgin sacrifice." The gangly ginger bloke - Ronald Weasley, he realized suddenly - snorted. "How long was I...?"

"Twenty years", Lovegood said calmly.

"Oh, God." He had known it, but it still felt like a Bludger to the gut and he curled up, pressing his face against his knees and rocking, shaking. "Why me? Why now?"

"It's like this," Granger said, behind his shoulder. "Lionel Carver, one of the research healers at St Mungo's, got interested in Luna's Blodeuwedd study and he's been doing some work on - well, it's a bit like what Muggles call cryogenic suspension. That means - if somebody's dying of something you can't cure now but you expect to be able to cure it soon, you can preserve them at point of death and see if you can revive them later. Or if - well, if somebody's like you were, with injuries they could survive if they were in hospital but you can't get them there. Lionel was meant to be here but he was called away to an emergency - we decided to go ahead anyway, because it's not very difficult really once it's set up, and if we didn't do it tonight the conditions wouldn't be right again for another year, and probably the worst that it could do was do nothing. We were pretty sure if we got you alive we could keep you that way, because we know what worked when Arthur was bitten."

"Lionel thought if you had somebody's memories taken at point of death," Lovegood said, nodding, "and some of their tissue, there might be enough information there to make a new body for them, using Gwydion's flower-spell. And, well, since we already had your memory from just before you died, with a little of your life-blood mixed into it, it didn't seem right to experiment on someone else."

"But it was all right to experiment on _me_," he said bitterly. "Oh God. Why couldn't you just leave me dead?"

"We thought that if anyone deserved a second chance, you did," Granger said seriously.

"I had my second chance, and see what - " The memory of Charity Burbage's upside-down face, weeping, pleading, of the hating green eyes of the boy he and Dumbledore had raised to die, of Minerva's voice calling out coward, coward as he fled from her and the hot smooth weight of the snake landing about his head and shoulders and the sick pulse throbbing in his neck surged up all together in one vast horrible jolt and he curled forwards, retching again, spewing up the little water that was all that was left in his stomach.

"It's all right," Weasley said suddenly as Lovegood cleaned him up again. "You don't have to stay if you don't want to, mate."

"Ron's right", maybe-Granger said, patting his arm, and Severus noted the affectionate, approving way her voice trailed across the name and marked her down as maybe-Weasley, with a flinching pang that nobody except the one lost little girl had ever, would ever speak about him in such a tone. "The ceremony has to be performed again after a year and a day, if you want to stay. If not, the new body will go back to flowers and you'll be free. We realized that - well, that you might have mixed feelings, all things considered, but we thought you'd want to be here for a bit so you could know - not just your portrait, but really you - how much everyone appreciates what you did for us. And the, uhm, your portrait thought you'd probably want to."

He turned his head, pressing his sharp cheekbone against his updrawn knees, and squinted at her sideways. "If I lived... I expected still to be doubted, hated even. I thought I might die in Azkaban."

"Well, there are people who still doubt the wisdom of some of the decisions which you and Professor Dumbledore made -"

"I doubt some of them myself."

"Yes. But the fact that you gave those memories as a dying testimony, that you helped Harry to win - almost nobody doubts that the memories were true. You're a hero, Severus. You're on the Chocolate Frog cards."

"Huh." There was still a horrible, cold ache inside him and he still felt light-headed and swimmy, but the nausea was beginning to recede. "Scowling, I presume."

The corners of probably-Hermione-Weasley's mouth twitched upwards. "Ferociously."

* * *

**Author's note:**

"She wants to be flowers but you make her owls": quote from a very creepy 1967 children's novel called _The Owl Service_ by Alan Garner, in which the spirits of Blodeuwedd, her husband and her lover possess people through the ages and force them to relive the pattern whereby one of two rivals for a woman's affection must die and the woman be turned from gentleness to savagery. Half-blood Severus and Muggle-born Hermione have both read it: pure-blooded Luna hasn't.


	3. 02 The Flowers of the Forest

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**2: THE FLOWERS OF THE FOREST**

More Blood-Replenishing Potion: as he swallowed the thick, sickly stuff with a shudder Ronald Weasley gave him an apologetic look. "You're going to have to take that muck every hour or two for days, like my dad did. Until the, uh" - he put his fingers up and touched the side of his own neck - "stop bleeding."

Severus nodded, curtly, feeling a dull flush of misery spreading across his skin. "You shouldn't be so - considerate. You must know that I helped Dumbledore to send your friend Potter to his death." First Lily, and then her son.

To his surprise, instead of looking solemn no-not-Granger smirked at him. "Well, yes. And then again, no."

He raised his brows at her. "It must be one or the other, surely?"

"You would have thought so," Ronald (he was going to have to get used to thinking of them by their given names, since he suspected there were two Weasleys here) said seriously, "but it didn't work out like that."

"Harry did die," Lovegood (no, Luna) said. "He went into the astral realms and met Professor Dumbledore and everything -"

"And what an unexpected pleasure _that_ must have been," Severus muttered under his breath. Ronald snorted inelegantly, and Luna smiled dreamily and impartially at both of them.

"Yes. But then he undied - something about being pure of heart and a willing sacrifice or something. And we thought - well, you were a willing sacrifice too, pretty much, and sort-of pure of heart, so if Harry deserved another chance, so did you. And that - well, maybe me finding out about Blodeuwedd was fate's way of giving it to you."

"That's a Jewish principle," Hermione said, nodding. "My gran taught it to me. God doesn't have to wave Her or His or Its great big magic wand in the sky and create obvious, unnatural miracles: She/He/It usually makes miracles by tweaking mundane events."

"It may be a miracle," Severus ground out, not looking at any of them, "but that doesn't prove it's meant to be a reward and not just another bloody punishment." Please God, merciful God, he was so _tired_ of being punished, even if it was no more than he deserved.

"You'll feel better when you've had a cup of tea and a sandwich and a kip," Ronald said. "_I_ always do."

Severus considered making a scathing remark about little things pleasing little minds, but when he thought about how long it was since he had eaten, even without the intervening twenty years of _time/not-time folding down like paper, tucked neatly away in a pocket at the back of his brain_ and his recent volcanic vomiting-fit, he realized that the boy - man - probably had a point. The hollow sensation in his stomach wasn't only misery and lingering fear. With a sudden unexpected feeling of lightness he realized that he had done his duty and never shirked it, and had somehow managed not to kill Lily's brat in the process, and there was no war and no Tom and no Carrow twins and no cold, hating former colleagues to sicken his stomach, and he was suddenly, ravenously hungry.

"Whereisis anyway?" he asked about a quarter of an hour later around a doorstep-sized slab of bread and cold beef and horseradish, vaguely aware that his mother would have clouted him for talking with his mouth full, and not caring. Having been dead for twenty years must surely excuse a man from the more petty social niceties.

"Hogsmeade," Luna replied with a smile. "This is my flat."

He was amazed it wasn't more bedizened - he would have expected something like Sybill Trelawney's Turkish-bazaar decor, but this was cool and minimalist and overwhelmingly oatmeal-coloured.

When he saw the nightshirt they were proposing to dress him in, his mouth turned down at the corners in no uncertain fashion. "I know it's a bit... orange," Ronald said apologetically. "Lionel was supposed to bring clothes for you but, well, we had to improvise, and since I'm about the same build..."

"Very well," Severus said curtly, trying not to sound too ungracious, and then forced himself to nod politely. Inwardly he cringed as the sheets were folded back to allow him to dress, baring at least part of his torso, even though all three of them had seen him naked less than an hour ago. He knew how he looked - scrawny and scarred and pasty-white - but even so the revulsion on the red-headed man's face made his stomach knot. He dropped his gaze, ashamed, and then realized with a flush of embarrassment that probably what had made the Weasley swallow like that was not his fish-belly pallor, but the trailing scars across his side where his father's belt-buckle had cut into him.

His back he knew to be worse, finished off with the raking gouges of Buckbeak's talons, fixed on the fly as they had been and then left to finish healing by themselves - their weeks-long sting a part of his penance for Charity's upturned, pleading face. With the sharp ears of the hunted he heard Hermione draw in a hissing breath at his shoulder, but Luna made no sound: only pressed the palm of her small hand briefly against his marred skin. The kindness in the touch twisted something inside him so that he jerked away in shock as if she had burned him, but when he opened his mouth on what would have been a stammering, confused apology she gave him an eldritch smile and held the nightshirt out ready for him.

As he shrugged his way into the horrible orange excrescence and then curled down on his side into the comfortable embrace of Luna Lovegood's guest-bed, he reflected that if Ronald Weasley had appeared to view his naked form with pleasure that would have been even more disturbing.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

In the dream, he was standing looking out of a large window (?), except that "out" wasn't quite right, there was a darkly comfortable room behind him, half-seen, light glinting softly on shadowy cauldrons and glass jars, and another room in front of him, below him, he was looking down at a prematurely balding man who was scratching away busily at a parchment... As he watched, the writer's sleeve trailed through the still-damp lettering, smearing it, and the man cursed under his breath and began to clear up the mess with his wand...

There was a dark railing in front of him, the edge of a balcony he thought, but when he put his hands on the rail and tried to lean out to get a better look he was met by some sort of barrier, and he looked up and there were other faces, other balconies, ranged across the curving walls of the inner room like stamps in an album, each one the gateway to another world. A swathe of Slytherin green and silver caught his eye and he glanced at it and saw Phineas Nigellus stroke his pointed beard and smile at him -

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

He jolted awake, frightened and confused, to find firm, deft fingers replacing the sodden dressing on his neck. A wiry, pointy little man of about sixty, with crinkled eyes and hair that stuck out over his ears like the feathers on a secretary bird, beamed down at him and said "Ah - Professor Snape. Welcome back to the land of the living." He looked as if a gust of wind could blow him away, but the hand which slid behind Snape's shoulders to lift him into a half-sitting position was as strong as iron.

Severus gulped down the proffered Blood-Replenishing Potion, grimacing, and replied "Healer Carver, I presume."

"Indeed, to be sure, most unfortunate I always feel, it sounds more like a Muggle surgeon, doesn't it? So ingenious, how they do that, but it could be worse, the name I mean, one of my predecessors was called Eustace Quack so of _course_ everybody called him 'Useless'..."

His patient lay back again, still feeling weak and achy and slightly dazed, and allowed himself to be manhandled as Carver prattled on relentlessly at the same time as efficiently taking Severus's pulse, his blood-pressure and a variety of more obscure readings. "So, do I pass muster?" he asked after a while, trying to sound as if he didn't much care.

"Mmm, yes, to be sure, your blood-pressure is still very low but that's only to be expected, and your reality reading is ninety-three percent, which - "

"Which means what, precisely?"

"That you probably aren't going to turn back into petals and rocks without warning," the other man replied crisply.

"And _with_ warning?"

"Oh, if it happens with warning we should be able to stabilize the matrix quite easily. Probably."

"I saw - earlier, when they - brought me back. I saw flowers, under my skin."

"Only to be expected, with such an untried team, but Mrs Weasley did a good job: a very good job."

Severus grimaced slightly at the memory of the neurotically eager, frighteningly over-educated schoolgirl. "She generally does."

"Ah, yes, of course, you taught her, didn't you? When you were..."

"When I was alive."

The older man paused in his chattering and gave his shoulder a firm, gentle pat. "You're alive now, you know: just with more... magical input."

"So what happens to me _now_?" He could feel a sick tremor starting in his gut, as the prospect of a renewed future stretched ahead of him with the usual unending bleakness, only now with no job and no purpose.

"You need to rest for a few weeks until your neck is quite healed and you've recovered from the, um, shock. And I don't want to, ah, go public about your... recovery until I've conducted a few more tests. Don't want to raise any false hopes in case you turn out to be a one-off case, you know? But I don't think you need to worry about - about money. The lecture fees alone..."

Severus nodded abruptly, not trusting himself to speak without retching. The worst of it was, he couldn't even set up shop as a potion-brewer any more, for his knowledge was twenty years out of date.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Your wand," Hermione said, "I'm afraid it was - well, it was buried with you. If you see what I mean."

He pressed the back of his hand against his mouth, curled up in Luna's guest-bed and Ron's horrible orange nightshirt. He heard her voice, as if from the other end of a tunnel, ask: "Are you all right?"

"Yes - no - it's - disturbing, that's all. To think of myself... decaying. Or having - having two bodies. When I die again I'll have two bodies won't I which is just so - very - they'll have to bury me in two places or will they cremate one of me or, or - "

"Steady on, mate," Ron muttered, but Luna just nodded thoughtfully.

"I can see how that would be," she said seriously. "Disturbing, I mean. But, well, as I understand it this body is perfectly real while you're alive in it but if - when you die again it will go back to flowers and stones. And really it's only the same as if you lose a body part - one that can be regrown - then there's a new live bit and an old dead bit, isn't there? Only this is - bigger."

He pressed his hands against his face, feeling the sharp jaw and the narrow prow of a nose, imagining those same bones stripped bare and mouldering somewhere under the earth, and wondered if he still had human DNA and human seed. If, through some unexpected opportunity, he were to get a woman pregnant, now, would she give birth to a son of his line, or to a green-man grotesque made of leaves and briars? "I cut - cut your brother's ear off, I think", he murmured to Ron. "With Sectumsempra."

"Yes. But he knows now that it was, um, friendly fire."

"It was an accident, yes. I was afraid Lupin was going to be killed" - and he had never had much of a head for heights, and the sting of Buckbeak's talons had stiffened his back like a board. "Did he - " forgive me, he wanted to say, but there was so much more that he needed to be forgiven for.

Hermione coughed gently.

"What?"

She gave him an apologetic look, although the corners of her mouth were quirking. "Well, uhm, as I recall, he said you were an, uhm, a clumsy bastard who couldn't hit a barn door at twenty paces, and you had - had had - a bloody nerve criticizing his technique for dicing newt eyes. He meant it nicely, though. I think."

"He felt really bad about you being dead," Ronald said seriously, "or he might have been nasty about it. But I wanted to ask you, si- Severus..." He gave the older man a pleading look. "What were you doing, with such a horrible spell? I mean, Harry and me, we really _liked_ the Prince, he seemed like a great guy, I would have died if it hadn't been for the Prince and his bezoar, and then, and then Harry used one of his - your - spells on Malfoy because Malfoy was trying to Cruciate him, and it carved him up!"

Severus blinked at him, trying to process the twin revelations that Potter had been acting in self-defence when he half-killed Severus's godson, and that Potter - or indeed anybody - had actually liked the sour, prickly, nervy boy he remembered himself to have been. His lips thinned at the memory. "I don't know if you can comprehend this, Weasley, but after your friend Potter's charming godfather tried to feed me to a werewolf, I thought I needed all the protection I could get and it made me feel - safer, knowing that I had a weapon. And weres - well, there aren't that many spells that work on them at all, but that was one of them."

He sighed and rubbed tiredly at the bridge of his nose. "Also, I was vain and silly enough that I was attracted to the name - it means 'Sever Forever', did you realize? If you'd found a spell that meant 'Red Weasels Rule' I'm sure you'd have felt the same."

"Not if it - not if it was really dangerous."

"Really? Well, in that case you must be more responsible than your brothers. And I was - I was careful with Sectumsempra, at school. If you use it to create simple cuts they _are_ just simple cuts, it's only if you cut something actually off with it... which, well, it's rigged not to cut bone so you can't take off an arm or anything even if - even if you still have to be careful about the soft bits. It's safer than Diffindo, in fact, if you need a weapon, and it had some more mundane practical uses. If you dice something sticky with it - like newt eyes - it stops the bits clumping back together. And I didn't expect some feckless bloody idiot to get hold of the book and use the spell without even finding out what the Latin meant."

"Yeah, well, Harry's never been very good with languages, except Parseltongue when he was a Horcrux, and that sort of came naturally. Or _un_-naturally, depending on how you look at it." He helped Severus to sit up, carefully avoiding touching any areas of bare flesh.

"So what's the - Potter doing now? Making a living signing his autograph, is he?" The suggestion that he himself might live off the proceeds of lectures had rankled rather.

"He's head of the Aurory," Hermione replied rather frostily. "He revolutionized the department."

"Merlin help us. And Lupin?" The silence stretched on uncomfortably, and he felt what little blood there was left in him drain out of his face.

"Remus died," Hermione said gently. "And Tonks. During the battle."

"Oh, Christ." He wanted to be sick. "He had a child didn't he I tried to - did he ever - did he know that I tried to save him?"

"I'm sorry. Harry told everybody what you did - he told Riddle and everybody there how you were always loyal to the Order, even to the last - but Remus was already dead."

"Oh Christ." The knowledge that the werewolf had gone to his death still believing that Geeky-Greasy-Snivellus had been a traitor hurt more than he would have believed possible, even when the folded thing at the back of his mind eased open a little and showed him a blurred image of Lupin, looking mortally embarrassed, surprisingly healthy and a little translucent, saying "I never _expected_ you to turn traitor, whatever Sirius thought, but we didn't know Dumbledore was dying and we all thought -" And poor Muggle-born Ted Tonks, for whose sake Drommie Black had scandalized all of Slytherin, had been killed in January - leaving her quite literally holding the baby, from the sound of it.

"Who else? Who _else_?"

And so they told him, a litany of the dead, an ample honour-guard for Charity, who would never have a grave - Remus and Nymphadora; Fred Weasley, his grinning-devil of a face frozen into stillness; brave Dobby and poor stupid Vincent Crabbe, whom he had tried to protect for seven years, taught by the Carrows to summon a magic fire he hadn't the wit to control: but at least there were few Slytherin dead. Driven out by Minerva they had sought to find him, to be guided by him, and failing to do so most had either regrouped behind Horace Slughorn and returned to defend the castle with the safety-in-numbers provided by a mixed rabble of parents and older siblings of all houses, or attached themselves rather half-heartedly to Tom's forces and then stayed well at the back, or simply drifted away, unsure of where their loyalties did or should lie. Even Lucius had survived, damn him, though Bellatrix was safely dead. Zacharias Smith, sneering to the last, cornered at bay and rather grudgingly defending a group of other underage students who had been trying to Floo away; Madam Puddifoot in her pink cardigan; dozens of others, more than they could name - but it was the death of Colin Creevey which made him tear up, shaken by grief. How he had fought for these children and tried to defend them, he had thought that at least the Muggle-borns he had helped to banish were safely out of it; but the stupid boy had crept back in, hunting for death or glory, and had found both.

He covered his face, overwhelmed by sorrow but too embarrassed to admit to the tears, and Hermione said gently "It was all a long time ago, sir."

"Not to him," her husband's voice replied. "To him it's still all like, last night."

"But wouldn't he...?" Luna's voice began, puzzled. "He was dead, so why would he think it was so terrible that _they_ were dead? Wouldn't he already know?"

Severus drew his hands away from his face, shakily, feeling a part of the folded memory rustle and unfurl. "When you're on the side of the dead, when they're coming towards you, then it's just - how things are and you're there and they're there and it's not - not tragic. Just how it is. But when you're here, on the side they've been leaving, then you can still feel the - the vacancy. Absence. The world is still diminished by their loss."

"Are you sorry that we brought you back?" Luna asked gently.

"I don't know - yes, no, I don't know. It was - when I was dead it all didn't hurt so much. But that's like being - being numb, it doesn't mean you've solved the problem, only that you can't feel it. And maybe I _should_ hurt."

"You have nothing to punish yourself for," Hermione said seriously, "but we thought that you - well, that you _might_ think you ought to punish yourself. And that it might help you to have the chance to learn that you really shouldn't."

"But why - why me? Why this - worthless - and not - " Colin-Charity-Remus-Ted-Nymphadora-Fred and he knew the answer, of course, mere coincidence, no-one would have chosen to save him if they could have had one of the others.

"You were the only one we _could_ save, of course," Hermione replied, and his stomach cringed at that _of course_, even though _of course_ he had known. "But even if we'd had a memory-at-death for someone else we would still probably have picked you - because we were able to consult your portrait in advance, of course, but also because we felt that, well, that you'd been treated very shabbily, especially by Professor Dumbledore, and had died with a lot of, uhm, unresolved stuff you might want to sort out, and plus you don't seem to have many relations or, uhm, friends so you might not be too badly... disturbed by finding that everybody you knew was suddenly twenty years older and you weren't."

"Most of the people I know will be _improved_ by being twenty years older," he muttered, thinking about an untamed furze-bush of hair and a desperately waving hand. "And how do you imagine that _you_ know what I have to be punished for, or how Dumbledore treated me?"

"From your portrait - you ought to meet him, you know, he'd be able to fill you in on a lot of what's been happening..." Severus stared at her, wondering if she had any idea how disturbing that idea was, especially since - _jarring/discontinuity/one consciousness overlaid over another/looking down from a balcony into the round room_ - "and from your memories, of course," her voice concluded.

"From my...?" He gaped at her, winded with shock. "Shit! That was supposed to be for Potter, for _Potter_, not for a bunch of prurient bloody _sightseers_ - " He could hardly draw breath, his stomach knotting with pain and with burning shame at the thought of other people's dirty fingers dabbling through his memories of Lily.

"We haven't actually seen them, as such," Luna's dreamy voice assured him, "but, well, several people from the Wizengamot did look at them - in order to formally clear your name, you know? They still weren't entirely sure that Harry wasn't just making things up, especially after he - well, saying you were dead and then you got resurrected is bound to worry people a bit. And one of them talked to Rita Skeeter and she, uh, wrote a book, which Harry said was surprisingly accurate considering the source and, well, everybody thinks you're terribly _romantic_..."

"Ro_man_tic?"

"Damn' straight, mate," Ronald said with a grin. "If you do decide to meet your adoring public, you're going to be beating the wimmin off with a stick."

Severus was torn between wincing - even a joking reference to violence against women brought up a slew of unpleasant associations, beginning with his father's raised hand - and a suddenly intrigued curiosity, which warmed parts of him he had almost forgotten existed. "Really?" He coughed, blushing a bit.

"Yeah, really. And if, um, you know, if you do decide to stay and you don't have anything lined up you know, work-wise, you could always come and work with George and me at Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes."

"You're offering me a - a job?" Severus replied blankly.

"Well - if you wanted it. We can always use a good spellwright and brewer, and you seemed to have the right, um, mindset, to judge from your - the Prince's - book. We were glad when they found that in your quarters, by the way - we were afraid it had been burnt."

"Yes I - I saw from Potter's memories that it had ended up in the Come-and-Go Room, so I got one of the house-elves... but I, I don't even have a wand, and my knowledge - twenty years out of date, twenty _years_ - " He clamped his mouth shut, flushing in shame to hear his own voice sound so close to a wail of despair.

"Yes, well," Luna said, "that was what I was going to say, earlier. I already spoke to Sandy - Mr Ollivander, that is - and he said he'd arrange a private session for you so you could choose a new wand without any - 'unwanted gawpers' was the way he put it."

"Oh! - oh God. I was so - I would have helped him if I could, I could hear him - " screaming, screaming in the cellars under the house, the old man twisting in agony and he could do nothing, another shame to add to his account, to go with Charity's tear-stained, desperate terror...

"He knows," she said gently. "He said you showed great fortitude and cunning, which are things he admires, and I was able to help him a bit, after they locked me in with him. Probably not before, of course."

"As for being twenty years out of date," Hermione added, "I thought of that, of course, and Neville says if you don't want to be in the library where everyone can see you you can camp out in his quarters while you catch up on all the journals. He's Herbology Professor," she added, forestalling the obvious question which she could see rising to his lips, "and he set himself up some rooms right out by the greenhouses. It's very nice - and private."

"Was Pomona...?" Her name hadn't been listed among the dead, but he had to be sure: the thought of losing another colleague turned his stomach, even if they had turned him out into the dark to die.

"She took a lot of curse-damage in the battle," Hermione replied seriously. "Her health never really recovered, so she took early retirement and went to live with her sister in Mevagissey."

"It was Neville who grew all the flowers we needed make your new body," Luna added. "He felt really bad about you dying, you know."

"I thought - thought he'd hate me. I was never kind to him."

"No, you weren't," she agreed calmly. "But you protected him, even from the Carrows, and he said - after Harry confirmed that what was in Rita's book was mostly almost nearly true, he said he thought you'd never been kind because nobody had ever been kind to you, and somebody ought to have tried it. So he thought - even if you decided not to stay, it would be good for you to come back just for a little while. So people could be kind to you."

* * *

**Author's note:**

Arthur was actually cured rapidly once St Mungo's developed an antidote to Nagini's poison, but the hospital had been treating him with other, less effective potions for about two and a half weeks at that point, and I'm assuming that that made a difference to the speed of his recovery, and that even if they'd had the correct antidote from the outset, a cure would still have taken some days.

_The Flowers of the Forest_ is a famous Scottish lament for the Scots dead at Flodden Field.

Although we never see Hermione observing anything like dietary laws, she also never goes home for Easter and only twice for Christmas during the whole time that we see her, and on one occasion she ducks out of going on a skiing holiday at Christmas. It seems pretty clear that her family are, at the least, not any sort of practising Christian, so I felt free to include a bit of not-very-observant Jewish background there - especially as a high proportion of British dentists have traditionally been Jews (see e.g. _The Jones Dental Dynasty_ **www. gentfamily. plus susser/dentists. htm**).

Because Sectumsempra translates as "Sever Forever", and because when he is fleeing at the end of HBP Snape accuses Harry of using "my own spells", plural, I had always assumed that Snape invented Sectumsempra. But now that we know that the name describes the action of the spell, and that Lupin refers to it by name as if he knows it well, and now that we've seen Lily accuse teenage Severus of hanging around with people who did Dark magic but not of doing it himself, I'm more inclined to believe Harry's first thought - that the Prince had simply copied the spell, which, after all, we do not see worked out in the margins of his book the way his other spells were.

It seems clear that transformed werewolves are immune to most magic - otherwise why would James have needed to rescue Severus at all? Remus turns into a thing with paws which cannot hold a wand or, presumably, do magic, so unless he was immune to magic young Severus ought simply to have been able to Stupefy him.

It is also pretty clear, from the cave scene in HBP where Harry uses Sectumsempra to hack at the Inferi, that the spell either cuts quite shallowly or cannot cut bone. The blade it generates is clearly very sharp - it easily cuts through the Inferi's soggy, rotting clothes - but hack as he might, Harry can only inflict flesh-wounds on them.


	4. 03 Pictures at an Exhibition

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**3: PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION**

He wasn't sure about the concept of kindness as it applied to himself: it was true that he had experienced very little, but he had never expected to, and he had an uneasy feeling that if he permitted it he would in some sense be becoming a client, a patient, a poor thing... But he undoubtedly _was_ a patient at present. Nagini's venom and his own jarring reconstitution had left him still feverish and queasy and sore; he was still grey about the gills from a combination of blood-loss and the adrenalin-rush of sheer terror which had surged through a body which had been reproduced all too accurately; and he had to admit that curling up in bed in one of the soft charcoal-grey nightshirts which Lionel had (thank God) brought for him, sinking gratefully into the mattress and just watching the sunlight and leaf-shadows dappling Luna Lovegood's curtains had a lot going for it.

Pleasant scents wafted in through the open window, along with the warm breeze, and he realized that Luna had taken the flat above the baker's on the high street, next to the Post Office. This seemed to be a deliberate choice to further her work with the Blodeuwedd owls, many of whom worked for the postal service, but it also ensured a ready supply of fresh bread and sticky buns.

When he wasn't simply dozing, Luna talked to him softly, telling him what was going on in the world of 2018 - although he was never sure quite how much of her conversation he could trust, and tried discreetly to check the more incredible parts with Lionel or with Hermione, who came almost every day, usually with Ronald in tow, although he was at a loss to understand why she should bother. For the first several days, his life was circumscribed by the twin limits of bed and the bathroom. The constant seepage of blood from his neck, and the necessity of being woken every hour or two to down more Blood-Replenishing Potion, left him permanently exhausted and faint: but the blessed thing about being constantly woken was that it gave the nightmares little chance to take hold, and he was able to loosen the reins of himself a little and fall into sleep without fearing what might await him there.

According to Luna, Kingsley Shacklebolt had taken over as Minister, and had finally ended the immemorial pact whereby the wizarding world sacrificed prisoners to the Dementors in order to keep them on their offshore island. The Dementors were not pleased, even though they had broken the contract first by swarming ashore at Riddle's behest, and much of the work of the Aurors was now taken up with fending off Dementor attacks on wizard and Muggle alike. On the basis of a childhood spent listening to cop shows through a cupboard door, Potter had introduced the Aurory to revolutionary ideas like collecting actual evidence of guilt, cautioning suspects and not roughing them up unduly; and Hermione was doing her best, with mixed success, to persuade the Department of Magical Law Enforcement to adopt the concepts of innocent-until-proven-guilty, equality before the law (even for non-humans and poor persons) and not slinging people into prison for twelve years without a trial.

All of which only served to bring back vivid memories of the six weeks which Severus himself had spent in Ministry custody, spanning a miserable, freezing Christmas and his own twenty-second birthday, being put through the mill first by human interrogators and then by Dementors. Those six weeks had haunted his dreams ever since, and still made the palms of his hands ache with remembered pain: even though Poppy Pomfrey had done a beautiful job of re-setting the smashed bones. He should be glad, he supposed, that other boys would no longer suffer the same fate, although he couldn't help but feel bitter about a scarring experience which, at the time, he had seen as just punishment for his failure to save Lily.

Yet, his bitterness was less than he had expected, almost a numb thing, like a foot which had gone to sleep. He wondered if it came of having been dead, or of Luna's unwonted and, in his view, unwarranted kindness (but not unwanted, oh no, if he was honest with himself it was oddly soothing to have somebody who wasn't a house-elf bring him a cup of coffee and a Danish pastry, and stay to talk to him almost as if they wanted to).

Luna's awareness of the Muggle world was limited, but Hermione was able to supply that deficit. Climate change in Britain was now an established fact, with cool wet summers and comparatively warm, windswept winters now the norm rather than the exception. Heavy flooding occurred almost every summer, now, especially in the English south-west, and Glastonbury frequently became an island again, as it had been in the Middle Ages. Small, amphibious hovercraft sold as well as cars in some areas, and Arthur Weasley was the proud owner of one which had some very unique features. Flowers and crops matured late and then kept going well into November, and the production of root crops and legumes in southern England had largely given way to rice and tomatoes; whilst the south coast was increasingly famous for its wines, and the soft-fruit-growing zone in Scotland was extending further north with every year.

Worldwide, there had been a spate of serious terrorist attacks, including an especially traumatic one in the U.S., and various Islamic Fundamentalist organizations had achieved power and then had for the most part settled down and sobered up, having discovered, like countless extremists before them, that when you are the ones responsible for paying the civil service and making sure the drains work it alters your priorities. There had been a war in Iraq, begun some years after his death, which had ground on messily for a decade of civil unrest before the combatants had worn themselves to a standstill and settled into an uneasy but fairly stable truce; while the rather similar situation in Northern Ireland had by now definitely stabilized at the occasional bout of brawling and name-calling, instead of bombs and murders.

India had overtaken Japan as the main hub of technological innovation, having been forced down that road by increasingly heavy monsoons which wrecked its agricultural economy. The American economy had also got into difficulties owing to a mass die-off of bees which had had a serious impact on farming, but the source of the infection had been discovered and American apiculture - and agriculture - was now gradually recovering. The government of Zimbabwe had collapsed and South Africa, already overstretched by its own problems, had ended up trying to oversee an interim legislature, with limited success; but the Aids epidemic in Africa had largely burnt out, with the deaths of the most susceptible individuals and the introduction of new, affordable immuno-modifying treatments. Hong Kong culture had over-run China to the point that China now had a recognizable if limited democracy; and North Korea had imploded under the weight of its own incompetence and was currently under UN administration as a famine-relief zone.

At home, the union between Scotland and England was looking increasingly shaky, and it was perhaps only a grim awareness of the incompetence of the Scottish Executive which had caused the Scots to vote, by a very narrow margin, to preserve Britain as a political entity. In England, the beleaguered Liberal-Democrat government lurched from economic crisis to economic crisis as it tried to deal with crop-failures and floods, although it was difficult to see what it could have done differently or better. There had been a huge wave of migration from Eastern Europe into Britain, but the Polish economic boom which began in 2012 had led to most of the migrants returning home again, along with many Britons who had seen their homes become almost worthless due to repeated flooding.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Once, talking quietly to Luna after a light, shared breakfast of fresh croissants and scrambled egg, he asked her about her private life, and she told him that she had spent six years married to a fellow naturalist, before the relationship drifted apart. "We had a lot of interests in common, of course," she said dreamily, "but common interests turned out to be all we had in common."

"An excellent basis for a friendship, I would imagine, but a poor one for a romance."

"Quite. He still writes to me, of course, and tells me all about his latest creatures."

Specimens from her own explorations were organized impressively neatly, laid out in drawers in dark-wood cases, rank upon rank: he had seen them, lining the corridor, whenever he wavered unsteadily across it to use the lavvie, or to soak himself in her ample bath, easing the burning ache in his bones and experimenting cautiously with the parameters and sensations of his renewed body.

She smiled one of her odd smiles. "I'd almost rather have Rolf just as a friend anyway. People may love you for all sorts of reasons which don't really have very much to do with you, if you see what I mean. Being liked is so much more personal, don't you find?"

"How the hell would I know?" he snapped, turning his back on her as far as he could do whilst sitting up in bed. "You know damned well that you lot bloody-well picked me as a test subject because you knew I had no-one I was close enough to to mind seeing them age twenty years!" Once, he would have thought of some of his colleagues as friends; but Charity had died screaming to him for the mercy he dared not give her, and Minerva had driven him out into the dark, and Horace had been too much older - a mentor rather than a friend - and was now older still.

Luna's small, firm hand appeared on his shoulder and refused to be shrugged off, even when he bowed his head and let his hair swing down to hide his face. "I'm sorry," she said seriously. "Hagrid always speaks of you as if he liked you a lot: I didn't know you hadn't noticed. And these things come in waves. I didn't really have any proper friends until sixth year, and now I have lots. Your portrait is really quite popular, especially now that - well, that people know you were so bad-tempered because you were dreadfully unhappy, rather than just nasty."

He made a numb, wordless noise of acquiescence and the hand patted him solicitously. "Of course, I always did know," she said serenely, "but some people don't notice these things. I could always see the Soul-Leeches, following you."

"My life if you want to call it that Lovegood is quite bizarre enough at the moment, without invoking your father's bloody fantasies."

"Oh, most of what Daddy writes is sort-of true, he just - tends to go for the most dramatic interpretation. For example, I realize now that Minister Fudge never did put any goblins in pies, but he _did_ threaten three prominent goblins that he'd eat them for breakfast, which they took him to mean literally because, well, they would, and he did turn a blind eye when Dolores Umbridge had one of them assassinated. And I can _see_ the Soul-Leeches. They're like Dementors, only smaller and damper and less dramatic, and they feed on pain and fear and shame - stuff like that. You usually had at least three."

Severus let himself slump back against the stacked pillows and stared at her through his lashes, hoping that she was wrong. But just as she had, or claimed she had, seen his misery and shame from the outset, so he had always known that her appearance of harmless dottiness hid a ruthless practicality and an incisive if slightly skewed intelligence. As her teacher he had rarely found much to criticize in her work, and when he did so she accepted it with a lack of rancour which was positively frustrating, and adjusted her working practices without fuss. If he had had more students like her he would have given up snarling as a strategy long since, since attempting to terrorize Luna was like biting cotton-wool.

After a moment he said quietly, "I was - sorry, when they took you away. I would have protected you if I could."

"I knew you would have done. If you could."

"Did they...?"

She smiled at him. "A little. But not a lot. I talked about things they couldn't see which were standing behind them, until they got so weirded-out they left me alone. Of course, some of the things I told them that I could see weren't really there."

"You amaze me." She did, too, that was the trouble. He blinked up at her and gave her the fleeting smirk that passed for a smile in his case. "Did you ever find your Crumple-Horned Snorkack?"

"Yes," she said, still smiling, "in a manner of speaking. But it was only an ordinary Snorkack with diseased horn-buds, and much less interesting than Daddy thought it was going to be."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

On the fifth day, his neck had almost stopped oozing, he was down to one dose of Blood-Replenishing Potion every four hours, and Lionel declared that tomorrow he would be able to get up and sit in a chair, and even to walk about a bit if he felt up to it.

That was an advance, he supposed, but the fact that he was now permitted to sleep four hours at a time meant that the nightmares had a chance to take hold again, as fresh and yet traditional as they had ever been. Lily falling backwards, her hair fanning out in death like a crackle of flame; the whistle and crack of his father's belt or of the cane which broke across his bruised skin; Charity begging him for help he dared not give her; Dumbledore falling backwards over the battlements of the tower; the narrow metal edge cracking down across his palms over and over as he struggled and begged; Mulciber, his friend Mulciber, wading up to the knees in blood, turning to him with a smile and opening his fingers to show a child's eyeball nestling in the palm of his hand; the Carrows cackling with insane glee as they forced a terrified Slytherin third year to Cruciate her own brother; _looking down from a balcony into a round room where a fussy little man was doing paperwork, there were rank on rank of other men and women standing behind similar balconies, all staring down into the same room, but he did not know if any of them was a friend excepting Phineas, and somewhere over to his right Dumbledore's eyes twinkled at him like the fires of hell;_ the thing that used to be Remus Lupin twisting, changing, howling at the mouth of the tunnel which was too dark and too long and much too low to run down; Lucius's smile, more hungry than the wolf-thing's and boding almost as ill; Riddle's high, fluting voice presiding over wrenching horrors; the Marauders whooping like hounds as they cornered him, panting, against a dead end; the Dementor breathing moistly outside the cell door as he nursed his broken hands in the dark; Lily, falling backwards, dying - Only now he had two new images to add to the jumbled litany of pain: the hot muscular weight of the snake coiling around his face as fire lanced into the side of his neck, and Minerva's voice calling coward, coward...

On the plus side, although he had woken several times to find the sheets soaked with sweat he hadn't actually wet himself in his terror, yet, and neither had he embarrassed himself in front of Luna by whimpering loudly enough to wake her.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

On the sixth day, he was down to one dose every six hours, and was able to dress himself in the plain black robes which Luna had set out for him, waver down the corridor to her elegantly comfortable sitting-room and flop untidily across her sofa. Luna herself had had to go out early to a naturalists' conference in Glasgow, but Hermione had come to keep him company instead - or possibly to keep an eye on him in case he started to turn back into flowers, although apart from a slight translucency of the skin his body now felt, and reacted, exactly as if it were real. He had ascertained that she had taken two weeks of annual leave from her job at the Ministry in order to help with his reconstitution, and he supposed he should be flattered, but instead he felt only flattened and depressed. Now that that horrible year of his Headmastership was over - long over, as it seemed - the blind determination to do his best and to protect what he could from the Carrows which had kept him going had run its course, and left only loneliness and exhaustion and the memory of his colleagues' closed, hating faces in its wake.

Hermione was prattling on about her children, who would soon both be home for the summer, although Hugo's Muggle primary school didn't close for another three weeks. It had been Midsummer's Eve when Severus was reconstituted, so Saturday 30th June was only a few days away, and Hermione was wondering whether to join Rose and travel down to London on the Hogwarts Express with her, for old time's sake, or did he think that that would embarrass her? - until he had to bite back on the rising wave of envy and shameful self-pity until he almost choked on it, remembering his own childhood spent seesawing between dread of school and equal dread of home, when the Hogwarts Express had been the only neutral haven, and that only if the Marauders didn't find him which, in fact, they nearly always did...

Restless and disturbed, he lurched unsteadily to his feet and walked across to the big window, seeking for some distraction, and leaned his palms heavily against the windowsill. As the leaves tossed and parted in the wind he glimpsed the castle looming against the skyline in the north-east, its walls a patchwork of different hues where chunks of stonework had been ripped out and replaced, and before it the boundary-wall and the fields where the breeze parted the long grass like fur and flipped it from green to silver and mauve - and then the trees shifted again, opening like a curtain, and off to his left he saw the smaller, nearer hill and the ruined house that stood on it -

Caught unawares, he made a sharp noise as if he had been punched and began to shake, staring at the scene of his own miserable, exiled death. Behind him, Hermione paused in her relentless chatter and moved swiftly to his side. When she saw what he was looking at she drew in a sharp breath and laid her hand lightly on his arm. That small contact was enough to break the hypnotic pull of the Shrieking Shack, so that he was able to jerk his eyes away from it and look down at her instead, trying to muster a sneer with which to meet the concern he could see in her upturned face although he could feel his own features sliding randomly, threatening to reveal his real feelings for all the world to see.

"I did try, you know," Hermione said quietly. "This time. When you were injured before, in third year, I was stupid, I just assumed you were OK and that Remus would know what he was talking about, but when you - all the time Harry was collecting your memories I tried every healing spell I could think of, to stop the bleeding. But nothing would help, and I remembered what happened with Arthur. You needed Blood-Replenishing Potion, as well as anti-venin, and even if I could have Sumoned it without it smashing into a wall it wouldn't have got there in time."

"It can't be helped," he said gruffly.

"I should have been able to help. I've never forgotten feeling so - so helpless, watching you die."

"It was a better death than I had anticipated," he answered in a subdued tone. "All the time that I was spying, I expected to be discovered, to be tortured horribly to death over days or weeks, and after - after Dumbledore's death, even if Riddle lost I expected to end my days in Azkaban. Believe me, a few moments of pain and Lily's eyes to look at as I was dying seemed like a profound mercy, in comparison to what I'd been expecting." Except that it had hurt so much, to know that he had been driven out from the nearest thing he had to a home, the nearest he had to family...

"Harry said that you were - were frightened. He could see you through Riddle's eyes," she added apologetically.

"Of course I was bloody frightened!" he responded roughly. "I was bloody petrified. I was petrified every moment I had to be near that - that - Him. And every moment in between, because I knew I'd have to go to him again soon. But it was still - not as bad as I had expected."

"Harry always says you were probably the bravest person he ever knew - that it takes much more nerve to stand still and pretend in front of someone you know may any moment kill you on a whim, and to go on doing it for years and years, than just to charge into battle whirling a sword."

Severus drew a rather shaky breath. "He got some sense and some bloody gratitude in his old age, then?"

"A bit. I see you _didn't_ get any grace or any manners."

"I," he replied severely, "am no older than I was twenty years ago." He resisted the urge to add "So what's your excuse?" and was glad that he had done so, when she suddenly smiled at him.

"I wouldn't recognize you if you were polite - and it was _you_ we wanted back, prickles and surly temper and all, not somebody - tame and bland."

Severus stared at her with his mouth open, trying to process that, and she grinned at him. "That was why - well, Neville grew the flowers for you, purple and yellow belladonnas, I thought that that was... appropriately Goth. But he added a couple of arum lilies, for - for her, but also because they're, uhm..."

"Vaguely phallic," he said with a nod of encouragement. "Go on."

"Yes, well, quite, he said you ought to have something a bit - masculine, to counteract all the 'beautiful ladies'. But he put in a handful of bramble blossoms, as well - for the prickles."

"How did you..." He made a vague gesture indicating himself. How did you summon me back from death, how did you turn a handful of flowers into me, how did you know who I was well enough to summon me, am I still Severus Snape, the grubby unloved little guttersnipe from the mill houses, or am I just a poor simulacrum which only thinks it's Severus Snape...

In reply, she pointed wordlessly towards a set of broad shelves in the corner of the room, cast into shadow by the brightness of the window, and he saw it for the first time - a shallow bowl of waxy blue-grey chalcedony, not as big as the one in Dumbledore's office but he knew it at once for what it was. "We steeped the flowers in your memories - and in your blood. There was enough blood caught in the flask..."

He had hardly needed to be told what was in the bowl - it was the part of himself which he had poured out for Potter, which he had given up, and he knew now why his habitual bitterness had been dulled. He still had the outline of those memories, they left a shape in his mind, but the taste of them was missing, and he knew that what was in the bowl was the root of bitterness, the core of pain, and he would have to drink it down even so.

"Not today," Hermione said gently, as if he had spoken aloud. "When you are rested, and you have your wand. But not today. And I should think you'll have enough to do with talking to your portrait."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

On the Saturday that the Hogwarts Express set out for London, while the children on board it were neither here nor there, one of the Thestral-drawn carriages came to carry him up to the castle. The ominous, vaguely reptilian horse-thing stood in the shafts in the cobbled high street, staring at him with its blank, milky eyes as most passers-by gave it a wide berth. There had been a lot of death in Hogsmeade, and Severus supposed with a shudder that his own body now lay in the little churchyard, along with Remus and Tonks.

The same faces, puzzled and wary, stole covert glances at the gaunt, sickly, oddly-familiar-looking man with the Slytherin scarf wrapped around his neck, making his unsteady way to the carriage as Luna kissed the Thestral on its scaly nose and offered it a Scotch egg. It lipped the delicacy off the palm of her hand and sighed heavily, spraying breadcrumbs.

The carriage rattled noisily over the cobbles, past the courtyard where Zonko's lay (although a quick glance through the window showed him that it had been taken over and was now a subsidiary of Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes), past the Three Broomsticks, re-painted but otherwise unchanged, past the narrow, ominous lane which led up to the Shrieking Shack, all on the right; then Gladrags on the left, although the fashions were strange to him, and the petshop, and a specialist broom-shop which was new to him and which was displaying a broom called the Starchaser3; a string of newsagents and grocers and other local services; Dervish & Banges on the left again and then the road branched away towards the castle. The main road continued on ahead, winding all the way to the foot of the mountain; but they took the track that bore right across the fields, bending around the base of the hill the Shrieking Shack stood on, where he had met the werewolf, where he had been flung into a wall and left to bleed, where he had died...

When the narrow lane turned first right and then left between its hedges, sloping upwards to join in with the road around Hogwarts and leaving the Shack behind it, he heaved a sigh of relief and Luna smiled at him. But as they approached the twin pillars tipped with winged boars his throat tightened again: for him it was little over a week since he had been driven out to die in exile, and the wound was raw.

Hagrid met them at the gates, walking down the long slope of the lawn with Hermione and Ron, who Severus knew meant to accompany him into the castle and then Floo down to London in time to meet the train. Even within his own subjective time-line, he had not seen Hagrid for months; and the half-grown black-and-white Newfoundland puppy running at Hagrid's heels was a reminder of how much time had passed - the remainder of Fang's lifetime, evidently, and another dog in between.

The half-giant had been the only living person in the school who had still believed in him, other than the house-elves and Horace Slughorn's wary "I'm sure I don't know what you're doing, Severus: I just hope that you do." He still wasn't sure which attitude he had preferred: Hagrid's firm belief that he was still on the side of the Order, or Horace's willingness to be at least cautiously friendly whichever side he was on. Either way, Hagrid's necessary exile, whilst it had protected the gamekeeper from the wrath of the Carrows, had left Headmaster Snape even more isolated and miserable than he already was; and the revelation that Hagrid had actually harboured some affection for him made that retrospective loss seem even more acute.

But he was here now: they were both here now, as strange as that seemed. Hagrid's face had a few more crinkles around the eyes and there were streaks of grey in his furze-bush of a beard: but since the man must be pushing ninety Severus supposed he was entitled. The gamekeeper's long legs strode beside the window, all the way up the sweep of the drive, past the Quidditch pitch, past the end of the lake and round towards the forecourt of the castle where a nondescript, round-faced man with thinning brown hair, of middle height and about his own age, stood waiting for them, smiling. Severus had to look three times to be sure that what he was looking at was Neville Longbottom.

[Longbottom whose father Frank had held him down, sneering at his cries, while the Aurors broke his hands. Longbottom whose parents' mind-destroying torture he had caused almost as surely as he had killed the Potters, when he revealed the partial prophecy to his erstwhile Lord, and he felt guilty that he couldn't feel more guilty about Frank but Alice had been a delightful girl, who had deserved far better...]

He was still wobbly enough on his feet that Ron had to help him down onto the gravelled track, where he was promptly and unceremoniously seized by Hagrid and caught up into an almost-literal bear-hug. "I was so sorry - so sorry to hear that yeh died," the half-giant's deep voice buzzed in his ear, with a breaking sob in it, and he thought about struggling against the iron grip and the bristling thicket of beard, but it was oddly comforting to go limp and just let himself be held, even when his feet left the ground and long black beard-hairs insinuated themselves into his mouth, and Hagrid's tears trickled damply over his hand where it clutched at the man's woolly jumper. "If anyone deserves a second chance, it's yeh. I always said yeh were a hero, an' yeh went an' proved it."

"Thank you, Rubeus," Severus murmured awkwardly into the beard, far more unnerved and uncertain in the face of praise than he had ever been when confronted by jeers and insults. "But I fear I shall make as big a mess of my second chance as I did of the first."

"Don't talk daft" Hagrid replied firmly, setting him back on his feet, and patting him on the shoulder so hard that he could feel his knees buckle. "Yeh'll do just fine." Severus realized that everybody else - Ron and Hermione, Luna, Neville, even the puppy and (so far as it was possible to tell) the Thestral - was beaming at himself and Hagrid with equally soppy, doting expressions. Neville took a step towards him, holding out both hands with a manner so warm and open that Severus took an automatic step backwards.

"If you try to hug me too, Longbottom," he hissed, "I won't be held responsible for the consequences" - but the boy (man!) only beamed fondly at him as if he had done something "cute". Perish the thought.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The man who met them at the top of the steps was of a rather similar type to Neville, although shorter and more balding, and Severus realized uneasily that he recognized him: this was the wizard he had dreamed of, scratching away at his paperwork in the round room which ought to have been familiar, if he hadn't been seeing it from such an odd angle...

The little man seized Severus's hand before he had time to withdraw it and pumped it vigorously. "Headmaster Snape - I'm Headmaster Dobson - Quincy Dobson - _so_ pleased to meet you in the, ah, in the flesh, so to speak, your portrait has always been a great favourite of mine..."

"Good grief, has he?" Severus said, surprized into spontaneity. "Why?"

"So, ah, _honest_, you know, and so young, not that that's - I mean, it's terrible that he - that you - died so young, but he's the only one who doesn't make me feel as if I was still damp behind the ears..."

"So pleased to be of service," Severus muttered, reclaiming his own hand and resisting the urge to count his fingers to make sure they were all still there. He followed his successor into the castle: the others, excepting Hagrid who stayed behind to tend to the Thestral, came with him. When Longbottom looked pointedly at Headmaster Dobson's back, rolled his eyes and flashed him a conspiratorial grin, he surprized himself by smiling back.

The school was almost as he remembered it, and he was thankful never to have seen the Great Hall used as a morgue, the bodies laid out there row on row, including his own. But parts of the front of the building had been extensively remodelled, after the giants and the Acromantulas had finished with it. The corridor from which he had fled after Minerva drove him out had been replaced by a gallery in which portraits of the former Headmasters and -mistresses, of the four Founders and of other famous figures from academic history were set out in a long line. "So that the, ah, students can come and consult them," Quincy Dobson explained, almost apologetically, "but we try to limit access to two hours a day so that the, ah, the portraits aren't _pestered_ too much..."

Most of the frames were currently empty, including Severus's own, but he was intrigued to see that he had apparently been painted gathering herbs in a shadowy glade at the edge of the Forbidden Forest, the sunlight streaming in long bars between trees through which the playing fields of Hogwarts could be glimpsed in an eternally shining distance. A golden sickle, a pair of pure silver secateurs and a rush basket lay discarded against the roots of an oak tree. Somebody seemed to have put a lot of thought and possibly money into the image - it was a work which had actual artistic merit, which was worth looking at because it was fine and it was striking, not just because it was an accurate portrayal of an ugly, unhappy man - and he was vaguely unnerved to see the white eyes of a Thestral gleaming at him between the trees on the night side of the glade.

He wondered whether students who had not yet seen death would be able to see this painted Thestral or not; but when he opened his mouth to ask, the words stuck in his throat.

Along the corridors and up the stairs, and he shouldn't feel as if he was walking to his own execution - he'd had the execution, and this was some sort of reprieve, or an extra punishment, he still wasn't sure about that point but it hurt anyway, walking to the office which had been his for almost a year under such terrible circumstances and from which he had been driven out so painfully. Still he couldn't resist cautiously patting the gargoyle when he hoped no-one was watching, and it arched its stone neck for him, and then skipped aside when Dobson uttered the password ("_Meles meles meles_").

Up the spiral stair, which turned under their feet: he drew a shuddering breath, trying to nerve himself up to face what he had never truly felt was his office, and felt Luna's fingers slip into the curve of his own hand and grip it firmly. The landing, the heavy oak door, and then they were in the office which was all the same and all different, the massed portraits were muttering among themselves and he could see at the edge of vision that the painted Dumbledore had risen to his feet but he wouldn't look at him, he wouldn't - He hunched his shoulders, looking down resolutely at the floor to let his hair hide his face, and Neville at his side touched his fingertips lightly against his former terror's upper arm, turning him gently to face in the right direction, and gave his shoulder an encouraging little pat.

Severus drew a deep breath and jerked his head up to face the shadow of himself.

* * *

**Author's note:**

The flower called deadly nightshade is also called belladonna, "beautiful lady", because it used to be used to make eye-drops which caused the pupils to expand in what was considered an attractive way.

In case anybody doesn't already know, a Scotch egg is a hardboiled egg encased in sausage-meat and golden breadcrumbs.

I'm deliberately not planning to give the new Headmaster much character development: that way, if and when JK announces the name and background of the new Head I'll be able to go back and tweak him to comply with the new canon without too much difficulty.

_Meles meles meles_ is the Western European badger: Dobson is obviously a Hufflepuff.

I am currently working my way through a series of minor revisions to _Mood Music_ and _Sons of Prophecy_, in order to bring them in line with the new canon backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_. When that's done, normalish service on _Sons of Prophecy_ and on _Lost and Found_ will be resumed.


	5. 04 A Speaking Likeness

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

This is, by my standards, a short chapter, but this seemed a natural place to break it: especially as the next bit is long and complicated and could take another week or two to write.

* * *

**4: A SPEAKING LIKENESS**

His immediate thought was to remember why he preferred to avoid mirrors. There confronting him was a thin, sour, waspish-looking individual as sallow as spoilt milk, slightly tidier than in life and with hair which somehow managed to look glossy rather than greasy (somebody, he thought, had given their artistic licence some quite vigorous exercise), but still dressed in his own habitual mourning-black. But now there was an unaccustomed glitter of silver pinned to the left breast of his crow's-wing robes, and his other self was frowning at him with an expression of tight-mouthed revulsion which he knew must mirror his own. Black eyes burned down at him like twin coals _there before him was a scrawny, beaky figure in black with a green and silver scarf wrapped rather incongruously around its neck, gazing up at him from -_

Severus stepped back with a jerk, feeling as if his eyeballs had just tried to turn themselves inside out, and his portrait self put one long, elegant hand up to cover those burning-black eyes, and winced visibly. Everything about the portrait, he noted abstractedly, was elegant, and again it spoke of money spent. His own image, a harsh composition in black and white, looked as austerely striking and inscrutable as a figure by Annigoni, and the setting was as solidly realized as a seventeenth century Dutch interior.

Behind him(self) he could recognizably make out part of his own quarters, fitfully lit by the green underwater light of windows against which the surface of the lake rose and fell with the Scottish rain. There, beside the figure, was part of his own shabby-but-comfortable sofa, and a corner of fireplace with the suggestion of flame dancing in the grate. There were his bookshelves, half-seen behind his own bony shoulders, and the small but well-stocked potions workspace in the corner of the room, with the Belfast sink and the stone bench. Among the shadows in the depths of the painted refuge, two doors stood slightly ajar, showing a few wisps of colour which hinted at the bedroom and bathroom beyond. Even the kettle in the corner had been faithfully copied, along with what looked like a biscuit tin... Somebody, he realized with shock, had gone to a great deal of trouble to make sure his alternate self would be comfortable and content, or as contented as he was capable of being.

But it was frightening, to look at himself, to see himself moving, to be able to interact with himself - of course, he had seen himself in a Pensieve many times, it didn't disturb him to see his own image without the reversal imposed by a mirror, but viewing himself in a Pensieve was little different, emotionally, from watching a Muggle film. This, though... He put his hand up self-consciously, touching his own impossibly large, ugly nose, the sour lines bitten in at the sides of his mouth, both clearly visible in his portrait, as the portrait's painted eyes glanced at his greasy, curtaining hair and its thin lips twisted in disgust. He wanted to hide behind that hair, to back away, to run - but the portrait's expression lifted suddenly into bitter mockery.

"Mum always said I was no oil-painting", said the painted self, "and I can quite see what she meant: but now, as you see, I've proved her wrong." The voice was slightly higher than he expected and embarrassingly more camp, but it still sounded like a rustle of silk, like rough honey - the only beautiful thing about him, although the idea of being seduced by your own voice was too disturbing for words.

His eyes were drawn, mesmerized, to the silver medal pinned to his portrait's chest, catching the light and shining like a star as the figure moved. "Is that...?" he started, putting his hand up as if to reach out to that glittering point, and the painted figure took a step backwards, even though he was nothing like near enough to really touch the surface of the picture.

"The Order of Merlin, First Class," portrait-Snape said quietly, with a little lift of his head. "The real medal was buried with m- h- us."

Behind him, Hermione's voice murmured "I'm sure the Minister would arrange to have a duplicate cast for you," and her husband's low growl added, almost on the edge of hearing, "...so he can cut a dash when he goes to meet his adoring fans..." There was a slight scuffling noise and a yelp which suggested that she had slapped him on the arm, but Severus had eyes only for his double.

"It really is true then, that they acknowledged... but they had to wait until I was _dead_." He felt childish for minding it: but the bleak years of isolation and scorn and the final misery of his exile hurt like toothache, and to be thanked for his dedication only after he was in his grave was black irony.

The portrait-self's mouth tightened bitterly. "It was easier that way - then they didn't have to actually mix with me at receptions." A sparkle of light glittered suddenly in his painted eyes. "But they will _now_, of course..."

"Was that why you - " Could the portrait, who was in a very real sense himself, really have dragged him back from death just to score a point over Kingsley Shacklebolt? Yes, of course I would, he thought with an edge of hysteria. "Was that why you told them it would be a good idea to bring me back - so I could rub the Ministry's noses in my - my _rehabilitation_, and gloat for you?"

"Are you telling me you don't think that that would be a good enough reason?" the portrait said waspishly. "But no, it wasn't - only that."

"What, then? Why did you tell them to bring me back? Could I not be - punished enough through you?" His heart felt as clenched and hard as an almond-shell, and part of him wished not to have an audience for this, and part of him didn't care, because nothing existed or mattered outside of this narrow focus between self and self.

The portrait sighed a tiny, painted sigh. "You sound like me twenty years ago."

"He is you twenty years ago" the portrait of Dumbledore said suddenly, and Severus whipped round to snarl as if he felt himself attacked.

"You stay out of this, I don't - don't want - " Grief and anger conspired to choke off his words as Dilys Derwent in her own frame tutted in disapproval. "_And_ you," he added with a snarl at the ringletted witch, and his portrait added "Meddling old harpy..." under whatever portraits had for breath.

"Dilys, I must protest," Phineas's _faux_-reedy voice cut in. "Is this a proper respect to show towards the Headmaster Emeritus, the bravest - "

"I was sacked, Phineas, in case you hadn't noticed," the portrait-Severus snapped, "not honourably discharged," and his breathing twin felt his stomach lurch in misery at the memory of his final flight from the place which had been his home, driven out by the same colleagues who had taught him since he was eleven.

"Gentlemen - ladies - please," Quincy Dobson muttered, wringing his hands together nervously. "I'm sure Professor Snape has sufficient on his mind without additional commentary."

"Whatever you feel is right, Severus", portrait-Dumbledore said, with a slight inclination of the head towards his current successor. His tone was so ostentatiously wise and kindly that it made the hair on the back of Severus's neck prickle. He felt as breathless as if he had been running a race and was amazed to realise that the presence of Neville Longbottom at his left, of Hermione and Ronald Weasley somewhere behind his right shoulder, made him feel immeasurably better and more secure.

Luna, meanwhile, was sitting on one of the side-tables, swinging her heels and looking as though anything which might be taking place was nothing to do with her; but she felt him looking and looked back, with a wide, sunny smile which elevated his spirits remarkably.

"All right." He drew a deep breath. "Explain, please."

The portrait dropped his black gaze, awkwardly and yet somehow still graceful - he was painted to be always graceful, now. He turned in a swirl of robes, silently, and went to sit on the visible end of sofa, facing the fire, his back half-turned to the watchers and his hard eagle's face in profile.

"When I - died," he said thinly, "I was as you know: bitter, exiled, reviled."

The Severus who was reborn, in the body, shut his eyes for a moment in pain. "Yes." Even as he said it he remembered that he had, unexpectedly, four allies ranged around him, to keep out the cold.

"Over the years," the portrait said with a frown, his eyebrows drawing down in a sweep and twist of black brushstrokes, "I have reached an... accommodation with my former colleagues, and received a degree of acclaim which - which counterbalanced some of the causes of my bitterness. Yet, I do not know whether I am the real Severus Snape, or at least some fragment of him, or a mere simulacrum. Even if I am real, I do not know whether any part of what I have learned will be transferred to the... primary persona."

"I don't know whether I'm real either. How can one _tell_? Maybe we're both simulacra, and the real us is still dead - probably burning in bloody hell-fire." But that wasn't right, was it: the folded memories of _between_ shuffled and opened just enough to show him that being dead had been, if not completely satisfying, at least fairly restful and not unpleasant.

"Is that a meaningful question?" Luna said, smiling brightly. "Maybe you're both really Severus, and there's another bit of you that's behind the Veil _as well_."

"Maybe," the portrait replied restlessly. "Perhaps. But even so, even if we're both fragments or extensions of a greater whole, this - person is an extension which is likely to die and to - become one with the original again sooner than I will. Assuming that this self, _my_self, will even have any sort of survival, if the paint and canvas are destroyed. I wanted my real self, my original, not to be left as bitter and isolated as I was when I died, and I wanted to share my experiences with some part of myself which might have immortality - not to spend twenty years or a thousand years in this form, learning, and then have that knowledge flake away in motes of dried-out pigments. And it isn't -"

He stood up again, suddenly, his fingers pressed to his lips as if to hold something in, and began to pace back and forth through the painted room, his robes a flurry of black smoke. Reflected firelight glinted fitfully from the medal at his breast as he swung round to face his more solid twin, his eyes suddenly glaring and wild.

"It isn't - fucking - _fair_ that I lived all my life like that, scorned, isolated, with the bloody oh-so-clean Order turning up their noses at the blood on my hands and the guilt on my shoulders which I carried for them, for them, and then when I was finally vindicated I was fucking _dead_ and couldn't go round and rub their bloody noses in it. I lived my whole - bloody - _life_ under threat and never got to find out what peace would be like or what it would be like not to be so bloody _scared_ all the time."

Flower-revenant Severus, Severus-in-the-body, shut his eyes and nodded, not trusting himself to speak in the face of his own blistering pain as the silk-and-honey voice continued remorselessly.

"I finally found a measure of acceptance, even of praise, when it was too late for me to do anything with them; they painted a medal on my chest and they buried it with me." A tap of footsteps - painted feet upon a painted floor, pacing, pausing. "Do not misunderstand me: my life, if that is the correct term, as a portrait is a comparatively pleasant and even relaxing one. But it is still limited, in both action and emotion, and I wanted a more vivid part of myself to know what it would feel like to be free even if - even if it came at the cost of re-opening old wounds. And I wanted to enjoy my vindication - I wanted to see all their faces when they found out that they had misjudged me."

"What - what do you want me to do about it?"

"What I want you to do," his other self said darkly and, God, he had never realized that you could _hear_ the smirk, "is to share my memories, and then go out and _live_ as I should have done, make the bastards swallow my vindication until they choke on it, and then come back and let me see it."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"If this is going to take a while, you really ought to sit down," Neville's voice said quietly at his elbow. For a moment Severus teetered on the point of snarling about the boy's disrespect in not addressing him as "sir", before memory caught up with knee-jerk hostility and reminded him that at this point Longbottom had been a teacher about as long as he had.

"Why?" he asked rather sulkily. "_He_ isn't."

"_He_ isn't still recovering from losing most of his blood-volume, and he's made of paint and brushwork: whereas you're flesh and blood. Sort of. And still a bit light on the 'blood' bit."

"And you would know, wouldn't you Longbottom?" he muttered as Quincy Dobson fussily drew up a chair for him (literally, by sketching it in the air with his wand). "I gather I have you to thank for the necessary - floral arrangements."

"'s right," Neville said cheerfully, and put out a steadying hand as Severus lost the battle with gravity and folded back and down into the chair in an undignified semi-collapse. He tilted his head back and let the circular room swim around him, until a muttered conversation between Hermione and Headmaster Dobson resulted in a cup of hot sweet tea which he clutched to him with both hands, and tried not to think about Dumbledore and sherbet lemons.

When he had regained his breath and the world felt a little less unstable, he held the cup out expectantly to be removed by the there-and-gone blur of a passing house-elf, and braced himself to face his double again. The painted self had advanced right to the front of the frame, as if it were a window, its edge cutting across him at the breast and his head and shoulders almost filling the canvas. For the first time the embodied Severus noticed, uneasily, that the swirl of carving which decorated the centre of the bottom bar of the frame was not just a swag of leaves, as he had vaguely assumed, but a spray of lilies, from behind which there emerged, on the right-hand side, the delicate head of a doe; on the left, that of a serpent.

"Very well." He moved his hand, restlessly, picking at the arm of the chair, and Hermione laid her fingertips lightly on his forearm, and he did not draw away.

"Are you quite sure you're - well, up to this?" she asked quietly.

"I've faced far worse in far worse condition."

"Yes, well - just because things have been bad, doesn't mean they have to go on being bad."

"Thank you for that piece of home-spun wisdom," he replied sourly. "I'd prefer to just get this _over_ with." He glanced at the looming face of his duplicate and then away, not quite meeting his (own?) eyes. "How shall we do this?"

"Simple Legilimency, I think," the other replied.

"Is that... possible, with a portrait?" He had tried, once, to read Dumbledore's portrait, and had failed - but he had never been able to read the man either. But he himself was also peculiarly resistant to Legilimency.

"Since we are so alike... I think so."

"Very well." He raised his head, jerkily, with effort, to meet the black gaze of his other self.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Once again, there was a profoundly uncomfortable sensation as if his eyes were turning inside-out; he was looking at himself looking at himself in an endless recursive loop, his mind was still in what passed for his body but his point of view was somewhere up the wall and looking down on himself - but this time he forced himself to relax and accept the dizzying inversion, and not recoil from his own pallid unloveliness. If it had not been for the touch of Hermione's fingers, he would not have known which self he was: he looked down on the scene through his other eyes and was puzzled by the concern with which his four former students watched him when they thought he wasn't watching back.

It was not quite like Legilimency, or not like any Legilimency he had performed before. There was no sense of the Other, of a barrier to be breached, no resilience against him. It was more like remembering himself in some other phase - the cowed child, perhaps, or the still-scared but defiant schoolboy - except that this was a phase of himself, a set of memories of himself, which he had never previously seen. Had never previously been. Fumbling, half here and half there, he made his way to the painted sofa before the painted fire, shut both sets of eyes and let himself fall back into memory.

* * *

**Author's note:**

Pietro Annigoni was a well-known Italian portrait painter whose portraits included two very austere, dignified, sculpturally-draped images of the Queen.

I had originally had Severus refer to his mother as "Mums" in this chapter, because people from north Derbyshire, which is one of the possible locations for Spinner's End, call their parents "Mums and Dads". However, this story aims to be as canon-compatible as possible and the revelation on Pottermore that Spinner's End is in Cokeworth, the area which contains the dingy hotel where Harry and the Dursleys stay while fleeing the letters from Hogwarts, and which is either a city or (more probably) a suburb or satellite town of a city, combined with the presence of a Cocker River just south of Lancaster and of a Snape Wood Farm a few miles south of that, has led me to see Spinner's End as probably being in a fictional satellite town at the southern end of the Lancaster/Morecambe/Heysham conurbation, just beyond Galgate. In real life Galgate ends almost a mile short of the Coker and there is a small gap between Galgate and Lancaster, but in the Potterverse Lancaster has expanded a bit.

"He's no oil painting" is a British expression meaning that somebody is decidedly plain.

Owing to added bone-conduction, your own voice always sounds deeper and less shrill to you than it does to other people.


	6. 05 Living Image

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

Apologies for the time it's taken to update this, but it's a very long and complicated chapter and it's been difficult to find more than twenty minutes a week for writing it in. For those of you who have forgotten where we are, flower-revenant!Severus is using Legilimency to examine the memories of portrait!Severus.

* * *

**5: LIVING IMAGE**

He should have been dead - he had been dead, surely, there had been a fierce hot pain and his own blood flowing out between his fingers, there had been bone-deep terror and a desperate will to do his duty and Potter's eyes, _her_ eyes, as green as springtime, there had been an aching desire both to see those eyes and to be truly seen by them at the last: but everything felt like grey wool and when he touched the side of his neck the pain dimmed to a dull ache and then blew away, leaving two healed blemishes, slightly raised. He shook his head slightly, trying to clear the wool away, he opened his eyes and Potter/Lily's green gaze was still there but the angle had changed, or gravity had: instead of lying on the floor looking up at those startling eyes he was looking down on them from a height...

It had taken him, he remembered, a moment to register his surroundings - he was/had been in his own quarters, or a fair approximation of them, but there was an oblong window which seemed to be attached to nothing, floating in mid air, and through it he could look down into what had been, until a subjective hour or so ago, _his_ office, but which now contained an indignantly-rumpled Harry Potter, much cleaner and better-dressed than when he had last (?) seen him a subjective two minutes ago, and possibly slightly older. Or perhaps that was just the effect of being respectably turned-out, although nothing on earth, it seemed, would make the blasted boy's hair lie flat.

In his mind he was still in shock, still strangling on the terror he had felt when Riddle set the snake to kill him, only a few minutes ago as it seemed to him but his body wasn't going along with it; part of him knew he should be shaking and dizzy with adrenalin but an adrenal system didn't seem to have been provided. "Potter..." he said warningly to the snub nose and the chippy expression, daring the boy to say anything as his mind scrabbled frantically against the realization that he was, in truth, dead and hung up on the wall as a portrait among the crowd of boring old farts and fossils who had been irritating him all year.

"Headmaster Snape - sir. Welcome back," the bane of his previous existence replied politely, and he could actually feel his jaw drop. It was the first time Potter had ever left him literally at a loss for words - he made a vague attempt to say something, anything, and all that came out was a vague _gick_ noise.

He swallowed and tried again. "Potter..." He put his hand up to his forehead, feeling hazy and confused and knowing that if he had still had the adrenalin he would have been on the ragged edge of hysteria. "What - why are you...?"

"You - you died, sir," Potter said quietly. "This is... you're in a portrait."

"I know I bloody died," he snarled. "That much was bloody obvious after Riddle's bloody snake used me as a bloody chew-toy. But why aren't you dead? Did we - did we _lose_?" But if they had lost, and Riddle had won after all, what was Potter doing alive and apparently free and in the Headmaster's office? Or were they both dead, and this was some bizarre version of the afterlife? Had he somehow ended up chained to this office even in true death?

"No, sir, we won. I - I did die, sort of. I knew I'd probably have to because of what you showed me so I went to Voldemort and let him kill me, only it - sort of didn't take. Again. At the time - well, I thought it might have been my willing sacrifice that protected the others but afterwards I thought - well, that maybe yours protected me..." he finished quietly.

"You - you saw the memories which I offered you," the portrait-self said in memory, feeling mortifyingly choked.

"Yes," Potter replied, his voice oddly gentle.

He bared his teeth at the boy like a dog. "Don't presume to think you understand me, Potter, just because - "

"You're not so bloody mysterious, you know," Potter snapped, and Severus raised his eyebrows. "I can see now why you - why seeing me made you... think about things that made you angry."

Crushing guilt, guilt and grief and the sharp physical pain of seeing Lily kissing and giggling with the gilded bully who had made his schooldays a protracted hell; Lily's eyes, the grass-green memory of love and loss, set in James's face that still made him want to curl up and weep with terror and humiliation; all mixed together in one nauseating, gut-knotting tangle. He opened his mouth to comment that the boy had not been blameless in himself, but Potter beat him to it.

"Not that I wasn't a little shit to you at times in any case," the boy said cheerfully. "I realize looking back that I wouldn't have dared pull half the stunts I pulled with you with McGonagall - she would have had my guts for garters."

"Thank you for that graphic image," Severus replied balefully. "A large part of it was that I was - angry, as you say, to see you feted as The Boy Who Lived, and receiving credit which properly belonged to your mother."

"Yeah, well," the other muttered, absently pushing his glasses up his nose with one knobbly forefinger, "I guess The Boy Who Lived makes for better propaganda than The Girl Who Died, doesn't it? But I never _asked_ to be their bloody poster-boy, and talking of graphic images and poster boys... Is it all right? The picture, I mean?"

In memory, the painted Snape opened his mouth to say "I _am_ the picture, Potter: how the hell should I know if it's 'all right' unless you bring me a mirror?" - with the passing thought, quickly suppressed, that the less it really looked like him, the better it would be. But before he had really started to say it, the memory of a few minutes ago caught up with him - _he was in his quarters_.

Behind Potter he could see other portraits: none of them except Phineas looked very well-disposed towards him, and all of them were painted against minimalist backgrounds - a chair, if they were lucky, and a draped curtain which obviated the need for any expensive detail. He, on the other hand, was standing in a fully-realized room, as precise and detailed as something by Vermeer. There were his comfortable old sofa and his shabby rag-rug in front of a glimmering, shifting orange fire; the heavy china sink and the stone worktop and the shelves of jars, gleaming in the greenish underwater light; the rows of books, which he felt sure would prove to be detailed and readable, not just a decoration; and -

With a sudden lifting of hope, he walked away from Potter, into the picture, and opened the doors which stood slightly ajar beyond the fire. His bathroom, his bedroom, both just as he recalled them except tidier and a little less shabby. The mirror over the sink showed him his own face as he remembered it, very little improved, except that his hair looked almost healthy: no longer lank with weariness and nervous tension. The green light shining in the depths of the aged glass made him look like a drowning man. On the other side of the room was a door which he did not unbolt, which should open onto a corridor in the dungeons of Hogwarts, but which he knew without knowing would lead him out into some other portrait.

He turned back to the boy, his movements jerky. "How - ?"

"I thought you wouldn't want to be on display all the time," Potter said, "so I asked the painter to give you some doors to close."

Relief flooded through him, knowing himself released from a torment he had scarcely begun to consider. The idea of being forever on show, whether waking or sleeping, of never again having even a moment's privacy, was ghastly to him, and he observed with detached, clinical interest that his hands were shaking slightly. "I - " The half-formed "thank you" stuck in his throat, especially as he wasn't really sure why all this was somehow Potter's doing. "That was a - considerate thought. But why did it fall to you to think it?" There must have been a better way to put that - he wondered if the boy would even understand what he meant.

Potter blinked, evidently turning the words over in what passed for his brain. "There was a bit of an, um, a - a difference of, um, opinion about whether you'd - well, what with you having, uh, off the school grounds, and having been, uh - "

"Having been ignominiously sacked and driven out by my own colleagues," Severus replied bitterly, and Potter gave him a nervous smile. Watching the boy trying to be tactful was like watching a frog trying to crochet.

"Yes, well... because you were neither in office nor on the school grounds when you - uh - "

"Died," Severus said flatly.

"Yes - that - so, uh, there wasn't a portrait generated _automatically_ because the castle didn't know that you'd - that you'd been killed."

"I am familiar with the magic involved. Normally in such cases - if a retired head dies in their bed" (_the lucky sods_ he added under his breath) "for example - some more or less indifferent artist is commissioned to cover the lack."

"Yeah, well," Potter said darkly, his face taking on the indignant, truculent look which Severus knew so well. "_Certain people_" - his eyes slid sideways expressively, indicating some of the other portraits - "claimed that you'd deserted your post and didn't belong here, but I told them, I told them you couldn't have stayed without firing on Professor McGonagall, and that it was all a misunderstanding and that you were - that you had ten times more right to be here than a bunch of narrow-minded old fossils half of whom never did anything but sign paperwork, and I couldn't have defeated Voldemort without you."

There was a muttering hiss of voices from the walls around him, and Severus realised with a sinking heart that he was back in the same situation he'd been in in the Order, surrounded by people who despised him for the very services which they themselves had required of him. But the realisation that the smouldering indignation in those green eyes, in Lily's eyes, was actually on his behalf and not against him gave him a strange, elusive sensation as if a very small and insubstantial wild bird's egg, the pale grey-blue of a winter sky, had cracked inside him and hatched a bubble of song.

Potter flashed him a sudden grin, fiercely smug. "So I played the celebrity card for all it was worth - it's got to be bloody-well worth _some_ good - and I threatened to make a scene until the Board of Governors backed down, and then I hired you the flashiest artist I could find, just to rub their noses in it. I thought you'd appreciate a sort of, uhm, vicarious gloat."

Severus inclined his head in silent acknowledgement, feeling his own lips escape his control and twist into a definite smirk. That explained the beautifully delineated interior scene and the subtle underwater light, and if he was doomed to spend near-eternity as the eternal outsider, at least he would do so from a position of advantage and not as the Order's whipping-boy.

"It was well done, Harry," a too-familiar voice said softly somewhere off to his right, and Severus jerked his head up again as if it was on wires - the Severus who was now, who was reborn, felt the action in the memory of the Severus of the portrait and wondered hazily that a painted body could still seem so real, such that he could feel the sharp pull of the tendons and the jointed flexion of bone - to see a shallow, sideways glimpse of that familiar blue-eyed stare. It hit him then that was going to spend a painted eternity hanging next to Albus Dumbledore. Oh joy. As the familiar tangle of grief and guilt and rage and humiliation and thwarted love rose up to choke him, he noted absently that even though he seemed fully rounded and solid to himself, he still saw the painted Dumbledore as a shallow sideways glance across a two-dimensional surface, not as a side view into a three-dimensional room.

"As if you would ever care what became of _me_," he snarled in his pain, and the blue eyes gazed back at him in cool assessment, insofar as he could tell from this angle.

"Just because I was prepared to sacrifice... both of you," the old man said levelly, "in order to put a stop to Voldemort's plans for our world, that does not mean that I would not have greatly preferred - another outcome."

"Don't lie to me! Not now, not now when I bloody died for you. You didn't even care if I - if I broke my bloody _soul_ for you, just so long as Draco's was safe."

The blue glint faltered, flickered - he could tell that the painted man had blinked, even at this angle. "I never thought for a moment that your soul was in any danger, Severus - I thought you understood that. You were committing no murder, only an act of mercy, and I knew you well enough to know that your remorse would heal you even as you killed me. Whereas Draco, if he could have brought himself to do it, would have felt a triumph which would have blighted his nature, and might well have become addictive."

"I don't -" _believe you_, he wanted to say, but the words stuck in his throat.

"I know that you preferred not to kill even when you followed Tom: you would be no murderer, Severus, and your soul would still be whole, even if you had killed this old carcase ten times over. I have always had complete trust in your good heart: I thought that you knew that."

_Liar!_ Severus whispered under his breath, remembering the same voice sneering at him in the bubble of silence at the heart of the storm, telling him how disgusting and selfish and altogether worthless he was; the same level tone lashing him almost into madness as he rocked and howled with grief; and he spun away and strode jerkily to the back of the room, blinded by hot tears which stung behind his lashes as he fought to contain them. Distantly, he was aware that Potter's pet artist had paid so much careful attention to detail that even his boots were more comfortable and better-made than he could have afforded in life. It was obscurely comforting to realize that somebody (even if it was only Potter) had thought his comfort worth considering.

He pressed the palms of his outstretched hands flat against the wall by the door and leaned his weight against them, breathing heavily. "And what does Minerva make of this - arrangement?" he said, without looking round. Surely that was now her office, out there beyond the fourth wall, so where... A sudden horrible fear gripped him. "Minerva - she's not -?"

"No, she - she's all right," Potter's voice answered him, understanding the half-articulated question, and he heaved a sigh of relief. It would have been too bitter to bear, to have fled to meet his own death rather than fire on her, and then to have her killed in any case. "But she was... ambiguous..."

Severus spun round to face him, his face so contorted with bitterness and pain that Potter took an involuntary step backwards. "She still thinks that I'm a _coward_ who fled my duty, is that it?"

"No, I - sir, no. Everybody knows how - how brave you were. I made sure they all knew." Severus blinked, trying to make up his mind whether to be touched or insulted at the idea of Potter taking him up as a Good Cause. "It's just - well, between you and me and the gatepost she's ashamed of not having trusted you and she's not looking forward to apologizing, especially as she thinks you're going to rub her nose in it."

The painted self smirked. "How well she does know me." He thought about that for a moment, feeling the smirk freeze and twist and become a flinch. "A pity she didn't know me well enough to know which bloody side I was on."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"It's a tribute to your skills as an actor, Severus, I suppose, but, damnit, you might have _told_ me."

"You might have _trusted_ me, instead of -" To be cast out so harshly by a woman who had taught him as a child - a woman whom he had admired greatly and perhaps even loved, in his own sullen, caustic way - had been rawly painful; and even though the feelings of this painted self were less physically acute than they had been in life, the memory still burned in his throat like acid.

"I - I did wonder, but when you wouldn't even take coffee with the rest of us any more, when you shut yourself off so completely -"

"How the hell -!" His voice cracked and wavered embarrassingly and he stopped and took a deep breath, wondering remotely why he should still need to. "How the _hell_ could I have sat in the staff room with the rest of you bloody harpies hating me, whispering about me - what do you think I _am_? Was. And I couldn't -" He turned his back on her, feeling the tears starting in his eyes. "I was there, Minerva," he said thickly, "I was there when they killed Charity, she begged me to save her but I couldn't, I _couldn't_, Dumbledore told me I was to keep my cover above all else so I could be in place to protect the students and I couldn't save her and she -" He stumbled blindly to the bookcase and leaned against it, trying to blank out the memory of his colleague's upside-down, pleading face.

"Even if I could have borne your hatred of me," he finished quietly, when he could breathe (?) again, "I couldn't have stood hearing you all speculating as to what had happened to her and - and me knowing, and not being allowed to say."

There was a long pause during which he simply leaned there with his head hanging, feeling as if he were awaiting execution. The revelation of his personal failure to save Charity was one for which he did not expect to be forgiven but he hadn't been a coward, he _hadn't_ - maintaining his iron composure in the face of her mortal terror had been almost the hardest thing he had ever done, and it would have been so much easier and less painful to die with her.

Then he heard Minerva's voice behind him say quietly "Severus - Severus, look at me please." His lips twitched despite himself at the faint hint of school-mistress-addressing-little-boy and he jerked his head up and forced himself to turn and face her, wondering hysterically if he was going to be caned again.

There were tears in Minerva's eyes when he looked at her, and he thought it was right that somebody should cry for Charity as he himself had been unable to do, when the memory of her death shrivelled his breath; but Minerva gave him a tight-lipped look as if she had bitten on a nut, and her words left him bitterly amazed.

"Severus," she said quietly, haltingly, "I want you to know that I am - sorry, for not trusting you better, and for what I said to you the last time I saw you, which was - which was en_tire_ly unjustified." She hesitated, paling, and then shut her eyes as if the sight of him pained her. "And I am - more sorry than I can say, that my apology could not be given to a living man."

Part of him wanted to comfort her, to reassure her and take her guilt away, but another part - and with all the certainty of an expert Occlumens' deep self-knowledge he knew that it was the larger part - thought that she damned-well _ought_ to feel guilty, for what she had done to him, and was guiltily pleased to see her hurt a tenth as much as he had been.

"I lived with the knowledge that I might die at any time," he said harshly, "every bloody day of my so-called bloody life. Anything anybody wanted to do to me - and it usually was bloody _to_ me - was always on the verge of being too bloody late."

"And now it is," Minerva agreed sadly. "But, Severus, you must see, after you - after you cut George Weasley's ear, any doubts - "

"Dear God, was that the crime I was condemned for - ?" It was horribly, darkly funny, after all that he had done and been forced to do.

"You were with our enemies, you fired on the Order, and Alastor died - "

"I was there on Dumbledore's bloody orders, and he knew there might be deaths - just as we knew Emmeline might die when he ordered me to give her location to Tom as a bloody tidbit! It was all - all of it! - on his bloody say-so - even, even letting Charity - "

Minerva stared up at him, her sharp eyes gone queasily old and troubled. "I knew - knew he must have to make hard choices, sometimes."

"As a commander must," he agreed, his anger deflating greyly into infinite weariness; "but he was never the one who had to watch them die."

"Did you never - never think to disobey him?"

"Once!" He bared his teeth in a sudden snarl. "And see how much thanks that fucking got me!"

"What do you - ?"

"George-bloody-Weasley's literally-bloody ear - I was aiming for Edrikson, I thought he was going to kill Lupin and I knew Dumbledore had told me not to risk my cover on any bloody account but I couldn't bear - and I suppose he bloody-well thinks I'm a traitor too, doesn't he, because nobody would ever think anything but the worst of _Snivellus_ even when he - " He made an abortive gesture towards the scars on his neck, his hand made clumsy with misery. "Did you bastards even bother to collect my body before it -?"

"After Harry - after Harry told us what had happened, Aberforth went and found it - you - and took you down to the church hall to lie with the other dead of Hogsmeade," Minerva said gently. "You understand that manoeuvring a body through the tunnel... But Lupin - Lupin died on school grounds."

And there it was, the litany of the dead - as fresh and as horrible in this vicarious, painted memory as it had been in the tranquil harbour of Luna's flat above the bakery; Lupin, Ted and Nymphadora Tonks, Colin Creevey, Fred Weasley, poor stupid Vincent Crabbe whose runny nose he had wiped when he was a homesick firstie - all of them stepped away and down into some other state where the part of himself which was not trapped here on canvas must also have gone, before being unceremoniously hoicked back again.

"But you must see," Minerva said, blowing her nose discreetly on a tartan handkerchief, "we never - never imagined that you had cut George's ear off by accident. You were always so expert in a duel - "

"But I was never much bloody good on a bloody broom, was I? Rolanda could have told you that." He had learned to fly under his own power, in the end, to overcome his terror of falling from an unstable and hex-prone aerial stick, but he had still been uncertain of his own ability that day. In any case it wouldn't have done to upstage the Dark Lord at his own party-trick and so he had clung wildly to the narrow, unstable strip of wood two hundred yards above the crawling lights of the suburbs and tried to save the man who had nearly killed him (even if it was through no fault of his own); the boy who had sat on the fence and allowed his swaggering bullies of friends to torment him, Severus, to the point of madness. But fence-sitting had been the nearest thing to mercy he could expect from any Gryffindor, after Lily had thrown him over, and he could not bear another death of someone he knew well, so soon after Charity.

And then he had had to watch Moody die anyway, the old Auror broken by the fall and gasping his last amid hard boots and jeers - somebody else who had thought him a traitor, who would never have believed any good of him even if he had martyred himself to prove his true loyalty (as he had done, in the end), but he would have given the paranoid old bastard a more dignified death if he could have done, even if Moody had helped to strip him of all dignity and reduce him to a sobbing wreck when he was twenty-one and puking his bruised-black guts up on the floor of a Ministry holding-cell...

Minerva tutted at him, her square glasses sliding down her nose. "Then you should have had more sense than to fire when you were not in full control of your mount: really, Severus, do you remember nothing of what I taught you about elementary wand-safety?"

"What are you going to do, Minerva?" he said listlessly. "Give me detention? Have Argus _whip_ me?"

His former teacher flushed slightly. "You know the rules were different then - and you had just vanished the staff table in the middle of breakfast. What were you _thinking_?"

"But that was just it. Even my - even my bloody father never beat me just for thinking - not if I didn't let it show on my face, anyway - and your 'elementary wand safety' didn't include warning us that just thinking about a spell could be enough to make it happen."

"I had no reason to anticipate that a first year would be able to perform non-verbal magic - "

"But you didn't believe me when I tried to explain - nobody ever bloody believed me." Not even Lily... not when the magical vortex of his anger and humiliation had dropped a branch on her sister without his conscious input, not when Sirius-bloody-Black had tried to kill him, not when he had begged for her forgiveness and told her how truly sorry he was... He scrubbed tiredly at his face with both hands. "Anyway, that isn't the point, is it? If Dumbledore permitted me and other students to be beaten, why was it so terrible in me that I could not always protect the students from physical chastisement by the Carrows?"

"I think the Carrows' idea of punishment was a little more extreme than - "

"Arthur Weasley still has the scars - for an offence for which I would have taken a handful of house-points, and been bloody-well blamed for doing so. And I couldn't - " He shut his eyes briefly, trying not to see the images burned into his memory. "You don't want to have seen what the Carrows would have done," he finished hoarsely, "if I hadn't been there to take the edge off them. I had to - had to stay, to pretend to be on their side. I didn't even dare to show my hand to you when you - when you drove me out, because if the - if Riddle had won I would have needed to stay, to salvage what I could. Yet I couldn't fire on you, considering you were..."

"I'm not _that_ old, Severus," Minerva replied without much rancour.

"You're not that bloody young, either, and after you were so badly affected by Umbridge's hexes when you tried to defend Hagrid - "

"That's another thing - you didn't tell me or Filius or any of the other staff what you were doing, you and Dumbledore both shut me out of the loop, and yet you confided in Hagrid who, with the best will in the world, is hardly a model of discretion."

"Oh, but didn't you _know_?" he said maliciously. "Hagrid's indiscretions were usually scripted for him by Dumbledore, just like my own - betrayals." But even malice had lost its savour, here on the other side of death. "Hagrid is immune to Legilimency - he was the only one I _could_ tell. And Aberforth, but he worked it out for himself - knowing how his brother treated his... creatures."

Minerva glanced at Dumbledore's portrait - empty, as all the portraits were empty, the occupants having removed themselves at her request to allow them some privacy or really, Severus thought, so she didn't have to grovel in front of witnesses. "If he had spoken to me, even dropped me some hint - "

"He told you that he trusted me - was that not enough? If you didn't trust me, could you not have trusted him?"

"I'm sorry" - and he thought, for a wonder, that she looked it, even if it was only guilt.

"He couldn't - he wouldn't speak to you after his, his death, because he knew you would ask him about me. He didn't want to go along with your impression that I had murdered him, because he knew that if we won his compliance might be used as evidence to condemn me, yet he couldn't tell you the truth in case Riddle read it in your mind. So he stayed out of it, for once in his unnaturally extended existence, and pretended to be sleeping."

"But then what would have happened if we had won and you had survived, if - if Harry hadn't seen your memories? Would the Ministry have taken a portrait's word for it - or an unqualified half-giant's? Dumbledore's secrecy could have sent you to Azkaban, whereas if he had only warned me in advance - "

"You would have tried to save him - "

"And you did not?"

"He - persuaded me." He looked at her bleakly. "May I sit down?"

"You don't need permission from me, Severus."

He remembered shouts and accusations and her assumption that she had the authority to dismiss him from the post to which both the Ministry and Dumbledore had appointed him, and pursed his lips and said nothing, only making his way stiffly to the couch.

"We never thought," he said remotely to the flames on the hearth, "that I would need to be exonerated. He would have come to my office, ostensibly seeking a cure for the poison which he had had Potter feed to him, and as far as anybody else was concerned I would simply have failed to save him. If it hadn't been for Draco's unexpected access of sudden bloody efficiency buggering the whole thing up, nothing more than a vague suspicion would ever have attached to me. And then - well, as I say, he didn't dare speak to you, because you were bound to ask him about that night, and whether he told the truth or told you I'd bloody murdered him, either way it would land me up the proverbial without a paddle."

"All right, I can see that, but still - I was acting Headmistress and he was honour-bound to obey me. All the portraits must have - must have known, and yet none of them told me, even though they should have bowed to my authority - what?"

He shook his head at her, smirking superciliously, and God, but malice still had some mileage. "He wanted to make sure I'd be able to come and go freely to the Head's office whatever happened, without the portraits giving me away. The night before he - died, he sacked you as Deputy Head _in absentia_ and appointed me in your place, and then as soon as he was dead I named you as my deputy."

"Damnit, Severus -!"

"Isn't that a good joke of Dumbledore's? Your authority, in fact, came from me. Right up until you - " He swallowed and swallowed again, trying to choke back the rising tide of darkness. "Until you drove me out to die, and called me - "

"I am - truly sorry."

He considered not forgiving her - of doing to her what Lily had done to him. Dare he consider himself better than Lily, to forgive where she had not? Yet it would seem churlish to reject what was probably the only sincere apology anyone had ever offered him.

"Don't trouble yourself," he said, and his mouth twisted sourly. "It was only me, after all."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

He had thought there would be mist between the images, perhaps, or some sort of cosmic, painterly switching station, like the wood between the worlds in a book he remembered reading as a child, where one could pick and choose among a selection of destinations; but this was more like Apparition without the effort, or a Floo without the flames. One opened a door - if one was lucky enough to have one - or simply walked at a wall, thinking about where one wanted to be, and the scenery changed as you moved, taking you sometimes into the midst of another painting, sometimes to a door which gave access to one. It was possible, though a little disorienting, to stride down a corridor's-worth of images whilst haranguing the latest unfortunate DADA teacher about the shortcomings of her syllabus, and have the scene switch on the beat of every second step.

He could have stepped into a portrait of himself in any other building on earth, if anybody on earth had been mad enough to want one. As it was, he was confined to the limits of the building he found himself in, so it was fortunate that Hogwarts provided so many images and so many opportunities for diversion, including, latterly, the celebrations marking the new millennium. And he would have a millennium or more to grow bored with it.

As a portrait, he found himself oddly simplified, shorn of the twin distractions of glands and glans, his emotions less layered and conflicted than they had been in life, although he could remember, sometimes, how they had felt. The sorrows and angers of the past were still complex, even viewed as it were through the other end of the telescope, but his feelings about his situation now were simplified and it was, perhaps, a mercy, that the hostility of many of his fellow portraits troubled him far less than his isolation within the Order had done. He was, he supposed, a two-dimensional thing, now, which imitated three dimensions, but it was only a trick of the eye.

He was not as isolated as he had feared, in any case. Some of the stuffier former heads - Dilys, especially - had sulked at him when he was alive and snarled at him now he was dead, an interloper, a half-blood, an untried boy without family or funds who had the nerve to think himself their equal, and the Fat Lady was a horror who never ceased to remind him of how she had seen him, shamed and pleading, debasing himself in front of her painted face for the chance to beg for Lily's non-existent forgiveness. And Phineas's friendship though sincere was a mixed blessing, since the old goat made a sport out of putting his colleagues' backs up.

Nevertheless, even if he had no other actual friends among the portraits, several of his predecessors were prepared to overlook his humble origins and his terse manners and turn a blind eye to the fact that he had served as headmaster for a meagre year, in respect of the fact that he had died more or less in the course of protecting the school. The Fat Lady's friend Violet had a worrying tendency to get tanked up and then flirt at him, and the fat knight on his fat pony was quite embarrassingly worshipful. And there was always the Baron.

There was, too, Minerva to talk to, and if it occurred to him that it was a pity she hadn't paid him more attention while he was alive, he was drearily grateful for what company and conversation he could get now - and he would have her company nearly for eternity, since she too would in her turn be translated into paint and hung on the tower wall.

And really, it wasn't bad, being a portrait, though he winced to think what it might have been like if not for Potter's unexpected generosity and understanding. But as it was, after a lifetime of frantic, scrabbling stress and overwork, it would take him a long time - several centuries, perhaps - to get tired of being able to spend as long as he wanted soaking in a hot bath, or sprawled bonelessly across the vast, rickety old bed in the back room. Even if he now needed neither sleep nor washing, in any real sense.

As the self that was now, that was reborn into the body flicked through the painted memories they stitched back on themselves by association, jumping back a month or a year to show him -

"Really, Phineas," Dilys's hard voice cut across him, ignoring his presence as effectively as she would have ignored a house-elf, "Snape may have died whilst in some sense performing his duty, but many professors of this school have done the same without expecting to be elevated for it, and he was never a true headmaster: simply Dumbledore's proxy."

"He defended the students of this school during its darkest hour - "

"But he did so on the orders of a mere portrait. A true headmaster would have expected the portrait to obey_him_."

Somewhere to Severus's right, somebody cleared their throat in a meaningful manner. "If I may be permitted to express an opinion, Dilys," the familiar voice said with a sort of frozen _faux_ politeness, "by advising him I was, you may say, obeying Severus's orders, since it was his wish that I continue to do so" and, God, that was nearly almost true, and he wasn't going to argue with anything which might get Dilys and her acolytes off his back.

"A true headmaster would not have needed to be_instructed_ like an unqualified student, Dumbledore."

"But you will observe, I think, Dilys, if you examine your memory carefully, that Severus did not seek my_instruction_ in matters relating to his administrative rôle as headmaster: only in those tactical matters in which I had been, and remained, his commanding officer."

"Then he should not have allowed his military rôle to intrude upon his position in this school."

"Unfortunately," the crisp, elderly voice said coldly, "Tom's settled interest in Hogwarts did not permit either of us the luxury of keeping our military and academic concerns separate. Whether we liked it or not, this school was both Tom's primary target and his goal, and it was he who decided that Hogwarts should be a battle-zone."

"We must not forget," Everard's voice said suddenly from higher up and much further back in time, "that Hogwarts was a castle before it was a school."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

About Dumbledore, he remained conflicted, even now (except that now was _then_, seen from some nineteen years later). No reduction into paint and canvas could simplify the complex swarm of emotions he felt about the old man who had been by turns mentor and tormentor, jailer and protector, a commanding presence and an annoying old fool.

"It was - good of you to defend me" he said awkwardly, cornered against a wall in the romantically-painted Highland shieling where Dumbledore had caught him, somewhere down on the fifth floor; and couldn't resist the little spike of spite which added: "Unexpected, too."

"You know I have always had the highest regard for you" the painting of the old man said softly, sincerely, and Severus spun away from him and went to look out of the window at the eternally sinking Scottish sun, the painted gulls wheeling over a painted sea.

"Liar," he said, in a voice which surprised him by its level reasonableness. "When I came to you, you told me that I was - disgusting."

"I was... judging you in the light of my own behaviour, I think, which I can see now was unjust of me."

"Your sister."

"Yes."

"Your sister whom you would never bloody have told me about, if I hadn't found half of it out already from Aberforth and the Skeeter creature's bloody book. Would you ever voluntarily have told me that I wasn't - wasn't the only one to have gone wrong, to have allowed my own idiotic political theories to cause the death of - No," he answered himself with a snarl, "you never bloody would, or you would have told me before you - I - "

"How would you have had me initiate that particular conversation?" Dumbledore said interestedly. "At what point - during dinner, perhaps? - would it have been appropriate to say, 'By the way, when I was seventeen I fell in love with a charming megalomaniac - male - and our shared plans for world domination led to the death of my mentally-handicapped sister'?"

"Everybody knew you preferred men anyway," Severus said distractedly. "It wasn't any great secret. It was only the - Grindelwald aspect..." He shook himself slightly, trying to get his attention back on track. "The time to have fucking _told_ me would have been when you were - tormenting me over my failure to save Lily and it was fucking _true_, wasn't it - " He smacked the side of his fist against the window-frame in frustration. "I did choose to rely on the wrong person to save her."

"I was - angry with my own failure, as well as with yours," the older man replied sombrely, and his face moved like a real face under the shadow of grief and yet it did so in the manner in which it was painted, less crisp and clean-edged than Severus's own image. The Severus who was now, who had been remade out of flowers, wondered - even through the weight of his shared and remembered sorrow - what would happen to a portrait who was painted in, say, the manner of Picasso or of Bacon. There were sound reasons behind much of the conservatism of the wizarding world, and he should be glad that some whimsy of Potter's hadn't landed him with both eyes on the same side of his face.

"If you had told me that at the time - "

"Would it have made a difference?"

"Christ, yes - I would have been - " He couldn't even bring himself to say it, the aching weight of years of self-blame crushed the words before they could form in his mouth, made more tearing by the knowledge that they could have been lightened, and had not been - that he had lacerated himself with the sense that he was uniquely sinful, and yet his sin was a shared one. Dumbledore had been there before him, and worse - since Dumbledore had planned on actually being a deranged dictator, instead of merely following one.

The painted Albus laid a hand on his elbow, tentatively, and Severus almost but not quite shrugged him off. "But you never bloody did think me worthy of your - _confidence_, did you?" he muttered. "You never even told me that the reason Sirius-bloody-Black attacked me was because he was mentally disturbed - I had to hear it from Minerva after I was bloody-well _dead_. You let me think I was protecting Potter when you were planning to sacrifice him - and then bloody let me think you were planning to sacrifice him when you knew he had a bloody chance, you made me think that I was complicit in his death - and now I hear from Minerva that he wasn't the only Horcrux, that there were several - including the snake which fucking killed me. Didn't it occur to you that I could have _helped_ Potter to find the Horcruxes, if you had only confided in me?"

He did shrug the old man off then, bringing his joined hands up with a jerk and pressing them against his teeth, so that his voice was muffled by it. "Even about the bloody wand, you didn't tell me the half of it - I had to find some of it out from Aberforth. Did you get some kind of thrill out of sending me to my death blindfold?"

"I had hoped not to send you to your death at all," Dumbledore replied with what sounded like genuine sadness. "I - you know why I didn't tell you about the multiple Horcruxes, about the possibility that Lily's blood in Tom's veins might in some sense function as a Horcrux for Harry. If Tom had suspected you - if he had decided to rip your mind - "

"Yet you did tell me about the Elder Wand - at least in part - and about the splinter of - of Riddle that was in Potter. What was this if not a security risk? Why those and not the rest?"

"It was - it was necessary that you should know these things in order to play your part, and the risk - " The old wizard turned away suddenly and began to pace, restlessly, back and forth over the brief length of the tiny cottage, his face tilted upwards and his eyes half closed behind the glitter of glass and gold, before coming to rest with his back turned to his erstwhile colleague. "I know that I have not always used you well," he said bleakly after a moment. "The misuse of power was always my special temptation, and you were - "

"Aberforth told me that you couldn't resist playing with your _toys_," Severus replied harshly, "and you knew every bloody string to make me dance."

"Perhaps," the other replied, sounding depressed: "although I wish that I had understood you one half as well as you imagine that I did. But I did, truly, want you to outlast me, and Tom: I wanted you to have your chance to be your own man. You deserved that, if anyone did." He spun back to face the younger man, and the always-setting sun made a point of fire in each half-moon lens. "Think, Severus. If I had told you - if you had known that _I_ knew that Tom had made multiple Horcruxes, and you had not warned him of this, and he had forced that information from you - what possible excuse could you have given him? It would have been absolute proof of your true loyalties, and your death. The same if I had told you that Tom might no more be able to kill Harry now than he could eighteen years ago."

"But what you had already told me was enough to sign my death warrant - so why balk at this?"

"I thought - it shouldn't matter if Tom found out that I had asked you to kill me. He knew that I _thought_ you were my agent, after all. And as for the wand - you knew that Tom knew I had the Elder Wand, and that he knew that I knew about it: there was nothing suspicious in your not telling him what you knew he knew already.

"As for the transfer of ownership, the fact that I expected that the mastery would either die with me or pass to you - I thought that you could, that you would say to him 'I did not think that it mattered: the old fool thought I was killing him on his orders but really I was doing it for you my Lord, and since I was but a tool in your hand the mastery will be yours.' As we planned. He might think that you had been foolish or presumptuous - he might punish you for it - but he would have no proof of your true allegiance."

"It was the death of me even so, that bloody wand," Severus muttered. "He realised it wouldn't work for him and assumed that I..."

"An irony I could have done without. If the mastery had indeed passed to you as we planned then I do believe that the wand would have worked for him when he tested it, since you wished it to and doing so would serve your interests; but since Harry had no idea..."

"Yes."

"You couldn't have - have saved yourself by telling him that the mastery had passed elsewhere? Told him what we had planned if it had ended with me, that because Grindelwald never defeated Gregorovitch, the mastery had gone to some unknown duellist who had?"

"What do you bloody take me for?" Severus snapped, raising his chin in offence. "I hadn't come that bloody far only to warn him - Lily's bloody _murderer_ - that he held a weapon that was bound to fail him! I'd have died ten times over if I thought it would help to avenge her."

"Oh, my dear..." The old man blinked hard as if holding back tears, and Severus looked away in embarrassment.

"Yes, well," he muttered. "But what excuse could I possibly have given for not telling him that Potter was a Horcrux, that his own death depended on Potter's..."

"You were supposed to use your imagination and tell him that since you knew he had other Horcruxes, and I did not know this, you had been sure that I was mistaken, that it would be safe for him to kill Harry - "

Severus jerked his head up as if on rails, glaring. "But, you bloody fool, you just told me why you couldn't _tell_ me he had other Horcruxes - !"

"Yes, well, " Dumbledore said again, rather fussily, "you were supposed to work it out for yourself, using the rare and enticing Dark Arts grimoires, complete with prominent chapters on the subject of Horcruxes and a little charm to keep them from Minerva's prying eyes, which I left in my office for you to find. You would have realized almost at once, I think, that the story I had told you about Voldemort placing a fragment of his soul into Harry almost by chance could not be true, that he had to have initiated the process of deliberately making a Horcrux for that to happen, and from there... And that way you would know, and yet you would be able to swear with almost complete truthfulness that you had no evidence that _I_ knew, and hence no reason to go to Tom about it. He would believe that you had been afraid, I think, to mention his own secret plans to him."

"So what went wrong?"

The older wizard took his spectacles off, huffed on them to moisten the glass and then polished them absent-mindedly on his sleeve. "Miss Granger," he said with a sigh. "In her - misguided ingenuity, she managed to pilfer the whole collection before you had a chance to see them. And I couldn't very well tell you about it, because that would take us back to you knowing that _I_ knew, and not warning Tom."

"Blast the girl. But yes I - I do see. I suppose. But - _He_ would have destroyed me anyway, if he realized I was still taking advice from y- from your portrait; so what was the point...?"

"By that point," the fussy, precise old voice said, "most of my plans had gone, as the saying is, tits up, and I was forced to extemporize. But at least you could swear truthfully that I - that my _living_ self had not ordered you to do this or that, and perhaps that truth would have been enough to avert Tom's suspicions before he found the other." A tight little smile flashed into and out of existence, and his eyes twinkled with suspect sweetness. "As for poor Sirius - I would have thought that the fact that he was mentally disturbed was self-evident."

Severus gave a faint snort of laughter at that, but it did little to lift the weight of sadness which had settled across his shoulders. As he watched, a painted gull - little more than a double arch of white - flitted across the window, screaming, and was gone.

"I hated you, you know," he said quietly. "I hated having to kill you, but I hated you enough to be able to do it - and I hated you for making me do it, and myself most of all, for being able to."

"You shouldn't hate yourself for having done what was necessary - what I required of you. Hate me, if you must hate someone."

"Oh, I do," he answered, and wished that it were true. "But you were my death, as I was yours, and I paid the price for my - obedience."

"I know you won't believe me," answered the sombre voice of the old man, "but I wish very much that you had not."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The next thing, a jagged, brilliant stained-glass window into memory, was the burning sense of himself standing perfectly still as a tall, serious-looking young woman with heavy dark eyebrows painted the medal onto his painted chest, the brush-point flicking silver across the dark of his robes, marking him with the sparkling point of light which showed that the people he had fought and died for had, finally, recognized some worth in him. The Order of Merlin, First Class, proposed by Arthur Weasley and seconded by Minister Shacklebolt himself, with the vociferous support of the sainted Potter and his little gang.

The knowledge that the Order had only fully accepted him once he was safely dead and they didn't have to - God forbid - actually mingle with him socially was a bitter weight; but when Phineas began on a forceful hand-clap which spread outwards in ripples until all the portraits of his predecessors and peers (even, grudgingly and finally, Dilys Derwent herself) were united in applauding him, that bitterness eased somewhat, and its place was taken by a bleakly nihilistic pride. He had lived a harsh life with little pleasure and less safety, and had died as isolated and rejected as he had lived, but he had, always, done his duty with a patient heroism which he was smugly aware of now and had been at the time, even if he was never going to admit that fact to anyone else.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Over time, he settled into some sort of accommodation with Dumbledore. The man still made him uneasy in many ways but they had shared things which no-one else on earth had shared, or even knew of: and although he considered himself no expert on the subject, he was aware that people did often form friendships, at least of a kind, on the basis of shared experience rather than deep liking. _There are things that I can say to you_, he thought, _that I can say to no-one else_; whether or not Albus was the person he would have chosen to say them to, if he'd had the option.

Minerva, too. The requirements of her working life as Headmistress meant that she often spent eight or nine hours at a stretch only a few feet away from his portrait, and he was damned if he was going to be driven out of his own painted rooms just to avoid her: so it was inevitable, if ironic, that he saw more of her now in death than he ever had in life. He was surprised to find that she preferred to discuss work-related difficulties with him rather than with Dumbledore, but when he plucked up the courage to ask her about it she pulled a waspish, point-nosed face and said shortly: "I want an opinion, not a Judgement of Solomon."

As the months grew into years, he actually found himself talking to her a little about things other than work. The memory of how she had driven him out still ached like a dull bruise in the middle of his chest, and Minerva's eyes on him were full of sorrow: the more so, perhaps, as they both saw how things might have been between them, when he was alive, if they had only talked more and teased each other less. But they got on better now than they ever had when he was mortal flesh. Severus was uncomfortably aware that this was, at least in part, because the portraits' traditional duty to obey the current Head meant that she was now able to shut him up if he grew too provoking, as she had not been able to do in life.

Among the incidents which stood out from the litany of Minerva's day-to-day duties was the replacement of Pomona, who had never fully recovered from curse-damage to her lungs sustained during the Battle of Hogwarts, and was moving down to stay with her sister in Cornwall, where it was felt that the sea air would be better for her.

"I don't know," Minerva said thoughtfully, tapping her ginger newt absently against the parchment. "Lavoire has the most experience, but _why_ did she resign from Beauxbatons? Does one believe her claim that she wished to expand her personal growth - which sounds like some sort of cyst - by experiencing Scotland's 'vibrant and unique culture', or was she given the boot for some unspecified offence?"

"Propositioning the Quidditch coach, perhaps." He peered over her elbow at an angle, reading the names off the parchment where it lay slantwise across the desk. "I'd probably go for Longbottom, if it were my choice."

"You amaze me, Severus. I thought that you regarded him as an unmitigated disaster."

"I spent the five years that he was in my Potions class expecting at any moment to be blown through the wall, but that isn't the point." He pressed his palms together in thought, clicking the nails of his forefingers against his teeth. "The fact of the matter is - he tends to dither and he shouldn't be allowed within fifty yards of a cauldron, but his written work was of an acceptable standard and clearly-stated, and Pomona always said he was one of the best Herbology students she'd ever taught. I'm not sure about his ability to control a class but he's conscientious and has a genuine enthusiasm for his subject - you could certainly do worse, especially compared with some of the clowns that Dumbledore hired over the years." Somewhere off to his right, Dumbledore's portrait sniffed audibly.

Longbottom, when he came for his interview, proved to have grown considerably and settled into a steady, sensible-looking young man, although still with the moving bulge which signalled a toad about the person. When he caught sight of Severus's portrait he flashed it a nervous, uncertain smile, and Severus had to fight with himself to suppress the urge to say "Boo!" and see if the boy would jump.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

He had been a portrait some seven years, and dead for eight, when the comparative calm of his half-life was shattered by a further infestation of Potter. Not that the boy - man - was entirely unwelcome, if he were to be truthful. Truth be told, he was thankful beyond measure for the comfort and privacy of his own quarters which Potter had provided for him, and it would be churlish to refuse to speak to him - although he supposed wryly that Minerva would say that "churlish" was his middle name.

But the cycle of escalating mutual anger had been broken, now. Lily's grass-green eyes in Potter's face looked at him with measured consideration, rather than the hatred and scorn which he had seen in them ever since that fateful, horrible morning under the beech tree when he had ruined everything. And so, now, he could see Lily's son as just himself, rather than as the living embodiment of every mistake he had ever made: and, taken just as himself, and now that he didn't have to attempt to actually teach him anything, he found the brat almost tolerable.

"The thing is," Potter said, shifting on the balls of his feet with a careless athletic energy which Severus had found profoundly annoying in life, "Ginny's expecting our second son any day now..."

"Why, Harry, that is excellent news!" Dumbledore said with an audible twinkle. "Isn't that good news, Severus?"

"I suppose congratulations are in order," Severus muttered. "I heard about little _James Sirius_" he added, with a cold curl of his lip.

Potter sighed. "Look, I know that they were - that they could be a pair of bloody bastards at times, but they were all the proper family I had, all right? Them and - and my mum, but we haven't had a daughter yet."

"How... predictable," Severus murmured, shutting his eyes against the pain of visualizing another flame-haired, green-eyed Lily running across the summer grounds. It had been painful enough when Potter had first started dating Ginny Weasley, seeing James's near-double whispering with his red-headed sweetheart; but at least Miss Weasley's hair had been, truth to tell, more carrot than flame, and her eyes were brown.

"Yeah well, the thing is - the thing is, I, uh - Iwonderedifeitherofyou'dmindifwecalledhimAlbusSever us?"

Severus blinked, trying to make sense of Potter's gabble, and as he did so Dumbledore's rather choked voice said "My dear boy! I would be - deeply touched." The old fool actually sounded as if he was almost weeping.

When he realised what Potter had said, he felt as if the blood he hadn't got had slowed in the veins he hadn't got either, and his notional breath caught in his throat. "Sir?" Potter said seriously, looking straight at him, and Severus looked steadily back.

"Not the werewolf?" he asked, more lightly than he felt, and Potter dropped his gaze and shuffled his feet.

"No," he said quietly. "Remus has - has a son, but you two..."

"There are reasons," Severus said rather maliciously, "why Headmaster Dumbledore never had children."

"Indeed," the old fool's voice said complacently, "and whatever you may have heard about spells to induce male pregnancy, the process is still in its - as it were - infancy."

"Eww." The green gaze flickered and encountered Severus's black one. He smirked, and instead of glaring Potter surprised him by smiling back, conspiratorial and amused.

Severus swallowed. "Yes," he said rather huskily. "Yes, I would be - pleased to have my name linked to that of Lily's grandson." He forbore to add that what pleased him most about it was how much it would have annoyed James, in case the blasted boy changed his mind.

Potter - Harry, he supposed - gave him a thoughtful look. "Sir," he said quietly, "do you mind if I - if I ask you something?"

He shut his eyes for a moment, dreading what might be coming. "You may ask," he said, finally: "but I reserve the right not to answer."

"It's just - I know that you and my mum were - were friends." His eyes flickered sideways, indicating the other portraits, an entire audience of painted ears.

"It's all right," Severus replied with a sigh, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyelids for a moment of weariness. "I appreciate your - attempt at tact, but thanks to the Fat Lady every portrait in this school knows that - that I loved her. And - why she ceased to love me."

"Yes, well, it's just - I don't know how to put this, but if you loved her, and um you protected me for her sake, why were you such a bastard to me? Didn't you think that she - that she'd want you to be nicer to me?"

Severus stared at him, and he felt - both in the painted memory and in the mind of the living man that watched it - as if the ground were sliding away under his feet. "I - " He braced his right hand against the couch to steady himself. "It never occurred to me."

"Yes but - why?"

"Because - " and he could feel the tremor as the muscles jumped in his arm. He shouldn't have to _think_ about this.

"Sir? Are you - ?"

He spun away, gripping the back of the couch with both hands, his shoulders bowed. "It never occurred to me because - because why would it bloody occur to me? My bloody mother never gave a damn whether anybody was 'nice' to me or not, so long as they stopped short of killing me, so why should I - why should I think that Lily would be any different?"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

He had been young when he died and he would be young, now, for all eternity - or a reasonable stab at it. But Minerva was still, for the moment, mortal flesh, and the years crept up on her as he watched. The time came that the years were too many, and she folded up her belongings in her old carpet bag for the last time, and went home to Invergarry - though he was pleased and touched to find that she had commissioned a small portrait of him so that he might go sometimes and visit her, until such time as she came back to hang on the wall beside him.

The arrival of Quincy Dobson was a curious experience, for he had taught Quincy, as Minerva had taught him - and he was amazed to find that the man evidently regarded the experience with some fondness, rather than the horror which he had expected. The fussy little schoolmaster spoke to him as if he were a living colleague rather than a useful tool, although he confessed that he found working with so many pairs of eyes on him unnerving.

"I, ah, never was any good at working while I was being watched," he murmured as he cleared a spreading stain of spilt ink from the document he'd been working on, "and every time I _notice_ them it's - 'Blast! Another blotch!'"

Severus had not been decanted onto canvas until a year or so after the Battle of Hogwarts, but it had taken some years to finish restoring all areas of the school. Moving from painting to painting throughout the castle he had built up a clear idea of the damage, and of what had been done to make it good. The classroom from which he had leapt all those years ago, when Minerva had driven him out into the spring evening, had been smashed away by a giant's club, and a whole section of wall with it, leaving the corridor behind it open to the air. When the facade was rebuilt, the row of wrecked classrooms had been cleared away and the corridor widened to make a long gallery overlooking the grounds.

The outer wall of this gallery was a glittering expanse of tall windows, looking out into the changeable Scottish weather. It was Quincy who thought of lining the opposite wall with duplicate portraits (complete with anti-fading charms), enabling the Heads and other worthies to interact directly with the students. Severus at first regarded the idea with deep-dyed suspicion, as being an imposition on his peaceful retirement. On the other hand, it would be a new diversion in a life where diversions were in short supply, and he was mollified by the promise that he would be required to teach for no more than two hours a day on weekdays and an hour on Saturdays.

And at least nobody could expect him to mark essays.

He was even more mollified when he saw the sketches for the new portrait. Many of the Heads already had duplicate portraits which were brought in from elsewhere: Phineas, for example, preferred not to maintain a presence in the house which had belonged to the family which was now extinct in the male line, and he would probably see more of the grandchildren of Narcissa and Andromeda Black at Hogwarts than he would at Grimmauld Place. Of those who required portraits to be newly painted, some simply opted for an armchair or a sweep of drapery such as they already had, whilst others - envying Severus his cosy domesticity - asked for some more complex background. Fortesque surprised everyone by insisting on an upright piano, which he played tolerably well considering his deafness.

But Severus... Harry Potter's vicarious one-upmanship and more adventurous Muggle tastes had, once again, paid for the painter: the same serious young woman (somewhat less young, now) who had come to add the Order of Merlin to her clear-edged image of him. And just as he had Potter to thank for giving him his rooms and his bed, so he had Longbottom to thank for giving him the green woods, the sunlight and the restful shade.

"I thought, you know," Longbottom's slightly northern burr said apologetically, "that you'd probably like to get outside for a bit: I know _I_ would, if it were me. But I, um, remembered that you didn't seem to like strong light much, so I said to Miss Agutter, if there were a lot of trees there you could have a choice...?"

"That all seems - acceptable." He flushed slightly. "It - surprises me somewhat that you should care, after..."

"Bellatrix Lestrange was a Death Eater," Longbottom said remotely, "and she tortured my parents until it tore their brains apart. I can remember - " He stopped and jerked his head, casting something off. "Amycus Carrow was a Death Eater, and he forced little damp-behind-the-ears first years to torture each other. You were a Death Eater, and you were a bad-tempered, ill-mannered nagger but I'm not going to hold it against you, especially after - after I saw what you were trying to do, keeping the Carrows off us when you could. And Harry's right - you were the bravest of all of us."

"I just did what needed to be done."

"Yes. But nobody else volunteered to do it, did they? Except Regulus Black, maybe, but he got killed too soon..."

"Both Slytherins, you will note," said the familiar _faux_-reedy voice.

"Yes, thank you, Phineas."

"Headmaster Black is right, though, isn't he?" the young man said interestedly. "I think Slytherins are really just as brave as Gryffindors, mostly - just... sneakier about it."

"That's an... interesting viewp- is that that bloody toad again?"

And so he had his sun and his shade to doze in through an eternal painted summer, and the green grounds to walk in if he wanted to, although sometimes they reminded him of things he'd rather forget. And he had the Thestral, who somehow turned out to be a mare he had known and liked when he was first teaching, and who was very surprised to find herself translated into paint.

Advising students about their Potions and Defence homework, or lecturing them about the war, proved to be less onerous than he had feared, although he shied away from any too-personal questions: especially after he discovered that Rita Skeeter had penned a lurid best-seller about him. And he found to his surprise that Longbottom actively sought him out - and was surprisingly good company.

The following year, he frequently found himself being badgered for stories by his namesake, a little dark scrap of a child in Slytherin green whose green eyes were full of curiosity and admiration. A few weeks into their second term, Albus Severus began to be accompanied by Scorpius Malfoy: a nervy, serious-minded boy who had, to Draco's undying disgust, been Sorted into Hufflepuff.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Dumbledore, for reasons known only to himself, chose to be painted standing on a cliff-top, against a cold sweep of Cornish sky.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

And then it was May, and Longbottom was standing with the sun behind him so that Severus couldn't quite see his face, and the boy said: "There's a chance - I don't know quite how to put this, and I can't promise it'll work, but - well, Luna and Hermione have been doing some work with one of the research healers at St Mungo's, about - about the spell that Gwydion used to bring Blodeuwedd to life. And they think - if you have someone's memories at the point of death, and some of their tissue, it might be possible to bring them back through the Veil and into a new body and, um, well, we thought we could try... if you wanted to, that is."

His non-existent breath caught in his throat as he realised what the younger man was saying (except - bizarre thought - Longbottom must be almost as old as he had been when he died, now). An offer of renewed life, for another part of himself, but - "Would I - would this - portrait cease to exist?"

"They don't know," Longbottom said gently. "They don't think so, but - they can't be certain."

And he thought about what he had gained, and lost, by existing as a portrait; about what it would mean to be a living man again, both the pleasures and the pains; about the risk of losing all that he had learned these past nineteen years, his memories wiped back to flakes of pigment; about the chance to step out of the frame and enjoy his new-found friendships on the far side of the fourth wall, and the dark thrill of seeing the Order's faces when they realised they had to welcome him in in person -

And he opened his mouth to speak, and his vision fell away, it peeled apart into two, and for a moment he was both in the painting and outside it, looking at himself looking at himself in an endless loop - and then his sense of self snapped back like elastic and he was once more slumped breathlessly in the chair which Quincy Dobson had conjured for him, staring up at his own portrait where it hung on the tower wall.

* * *

**Author's note:**

The fourth wall is a theatrical term for the open side of the stage, facing the audience. A fourth-wall breach is a story in which fictional characters interact directly with their creator or readers, breaking down the barriers between reality and fiction. From the point of view of an animated portrait, they exist in the fiction of the painting, the real world is the world of the flesh-and-blood observers who look at the picture, and their ability to interact with the observer is a fourth-wall breach.

We do not know when corporal punishment ended at Hogwarts, but it's very likely that it extended for a considerable time after Dumbledore became Headmaster, which was probably in the early 1960s. We also know Minerva began working there in 1956.

We do not know how old Molly and Arthur are, except that Molly had left school before Snape and the Marauders started, but their first child, Bill, was born _circa_ 1970 and as they were already courting at school, and are demonstrably very fertile, they probably hadn't left school very long beforehand. So we can assume that they overlapped Dumbledore's Headmastership by at least several years, and probably didn't even start at Hogwarts until well after Minerva was appointed. Whilst Arthur and Molly were at school, and old enough to be courting, Arthur was beaten so badly by Apollyon Pringle, the then caretaker, that he was scarred for life.

So we know that Dumbledore initially sanctioned quite extreme physical punishments, and it's quite possible that these extended into the Seventies when Snape and the Marauders were at school. Whether they did or not, the point certainly stands that the Dumbledore-and-McGonagall regime permitted extreme corporal punishment for at least some years, and are therefore not in a good position to criticize Severus for failing to control the Carrows completely.

The wood between the worlds appeared in CS Lewis's book _The Magician's Nephew_, the prequel to the Narnia series. In it, a series of apparently shallow pools are each a gateway to a different world.

**N.B.** for granfolf(), the reviewer who complained that in the first full-length chapter "the scene transactions aren't very smooth": I sincerely hope that they aren't, as they were deliberately constructed to be as jarring for the reader as they were for Severus himself. Controlling the speed of these sort of transitions, as well as the speed of movement of individual sentences, is part of how one creates atmosphere in a story.


	7. 06 Darkness Visible

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**6: DARKNESS VISIBLE**

He seemed to have four legs, and not in the sense of Black or Lupin. When he tried to stand, he couldn't work out which pair he was meant to be using, and would have measured his length had Luna not mysteriously already had a hold of his elbow. His portrait-self looked austerely amused by his antics, but he noted that the long white brush-strokes of the man(?)'s fingers had a surreptitious grip on the back of the painted sofa.

He turned down the offer of a second cup of tea, with biscuits: he knew intellectually that hot liquid and a little sugar would be good for him but his head was in a whirl and his eyes kept trying to see the room from two angles at once. All he wanted was to get away somewhere quiet where he could work out which of himselves he thought he was.

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Afterwards, Severus wasn't quite sure how he had got from the Headmaster's office back down to the front lawn; everything after his mind had broken away from his portrait's was a disorienting blur. He could remember making a few disjointed remarks to the Headmaster; could remember taking a distracted leave of his _doppelgänger_, and then leaning heavily on Neville Longbottom's surprisingly muscular arm all the way down the stairs because his brain still didn't seem to know which set of legs it was trying to use; and he thought that he should have been less brusque to Dumbledore's portrait, seeing that they seemed after all to have reached some sort of accommodation within the painted world, but he had been too eager to get outside into the nice fresh air before he threw up.

Not that the air outside was all that fresh, as it happened: the day was humid, and a fine mist was beginning to form over the loch. Perhaps it was a haar, rolling in from the sea beyond the mountains. He took an awkward leave of Hermione and Ron, who were going to Floo down to Devon to collect Hugo from his grandparents' house, and thence to London to meet Rose off the train. He promised - amazingly - to be in touch with Longbottom soon and - even more amazingly - found that he meant it, and then Hagrid brought up the Thestral-drawn carriage and embraced him again, clumsily, and then somehow he was in the dark, leather-clad interior of the cab with Luna Lovegood, bowling down the long, winding driveway towards the gates and towards Luna's sunny, airy flat with its smells of new bread and clean linen. "Going home," he thought, with a pang of longing and of relief, and the realisation was a dull, aching shock.

The warm, muggy air of June in Scotland made his clothes cling to him like a bandage, but as they rolled through the gates and out into the countryside the weather was changing and the wetness was turning to chill. Through the rear window, back up the slope behind them, he could still see the castle which had been his home since he was eleven, where he had been proud to become a teacher among those who had taught him; but it was home no longer, they had driven him out, an exile, a supplicant dependant on his former student's charity. And small wonder, for he was not even the man who had once lived in those scholar-infested halls but a created thing, a mere trinket made of flowers which imagined itself a man, but he was no more truly alive than the chessmen on their ivory and ebony chequerboard (_mere paint on canvas, black on white, without life, late-come and little-regarded_), while the real him mouldered in the earth unmourned, and the gathering mist rolled in to cover the castle behind him.

There approaching ahead and to their left, above the line of the hedge, he could still make out the small hill crowned by the Shrieking Shack - the house of the wolf, where he had suffered and died, where he had been expendable and expended, and he shuddered in the cold draught which blew to him across the open fields between here and there. He had been prey, only, food for the serpent and the wolf - a toy for the bullies, a pawn to his masters and a worthless discard to Lily's son, the flowers of the forest were a' wede away and it was not after all surprising that his parents, his contemporaries, his colleagues and his students all despised such an awkward, ugly -

He could see Luna's face through the mist which had invaded the carriage with them, there were fog-jewels like points of glass starring her short blond hair and her mouth was opening and closing, telling him something; the hateful whispering which filled his ears drowned her out but he should have known, he did know, bugger it, that from her first day at Hogwarts she had never shown him anything but warmth and a vague abstracted sort of respect, and he clung to that as to an anchor as he began the disciplined process of turning his mind outwards in layers of defensive shell, as the Thestral reared up in his harness and made a harsh, violent noise and Lovegood cast with her wand and sent a great silver hare racing round and round the carriage, facing down the dark.

Severus was still confused, that was his only excuse for not having realised what was happening at once - he _was_ still confused, when he tried to reach into his mind to shield himself his point of view kept trying to flip back to that painted room on the tower wall. It was tempting to flee into that inner world behind the glass, where no Dementor would ever touch him, and if he did so he suspected the nightmare-eater would find his physical body empty and of no interest: but that would mean leaving Luna alone to face what was clearly a serious attack. However competent she was, she was still out - out-_thinged_, he thought crazily, not out-manned, surely?

If he'd had his wand he could have flown away, he could have carried Luna with him, but he could not even cast the beloved doe, betrayed and betraying. Fog and damp and bitter cold and Luna's intent face muttering the Patronus spell over and over under her breath, the mist swirling away like tattered sheets as the shining great hare loped past but it couldn't be on all sides of the carriage at once - Minerva might be able to cast eight cats and herself the ninth, but even if Luna likewise was confident or vain enough to be her own Patronus, hares had only the one life, and wherever it passed by the white mist gathered again behind it and began to coalesce into towering darkness, the remembered chill of Azkaban was in his bones, the hopelessness and the hunger and the foul smell and the ache of shattered, half-healed hands and how like him it was to have as his Patronus the symbol of someone who had, quite rightly, cast him off -

But she had been glorious to him, powerful to him, and he hissed in anger at the darkness pressing against his mind and beat it back with the torch of her hair, burning in memory. It did not matter that she had not defended him in life, the hard outer shell of his mind told himself firmly: she was still his shining Lils whose light could drive out the darkness, whether she had done so in practice or not, and he schooled his mind to think of her glory and not of her scorn and it was easier than it had ever been, because the most part of the memory of that scorn was lying in a bowl in Lovegood's flat. Strength came to him easily when he called for it, and damned if it mattered whether all the bad things he thought about himself were true, he might be a phantom made of flowers and moonshine but if he was real enough for a Dementor to feed on he was real enough to give the bastard things a sickener of him -

Bereft of guidance the Thestral screamed again, rearing and flailing - it should be immune to the soul-freezing psychic field of the Dementors but by craning out of the window Severus could see that a hand like a soggy, greying fungus had hold of the bridle, pulling the winged horse-thing physically back to earth. As the moon-hare bounded by with a noise like tearing paper he summoned all his willpower to cast a wandless Patronus; he could feel the soul-projection beginning to form but he could not hear his own voice, chanting the words, and the ripple of silver light was wavering - bone-deep coldness was creeping towards his heart, his brain, slowing his movements even as he struggled against it, Lils was dead, dead and rotting and it was all his fault and then Luna's hand was on his, warm and alive and steady as it pressed the strip of wood up into his palm, and he knew that the lost girl was still real, as he was, she still had a footprint in the world, and he did, even if the bodies of those children had been left behind, and the silver doe sprang up and outwards, and every graceful curve was Lily to him.

[Even as he cast the doe a part of him was outside the moment, watching. Analysis was the key, it always had been - that was the true armour no-one could take from him, though he could feel his jawline turning slightly pink as that cool, measuring part of himself which the Dementors could not touch noted clinically how... ejaculatory it was to use a wand to shoot out a white essence which represented joy, especially when the focus of that joy was a desired girl.]

Several things happened at once. As the doe opened her mouth in a silent shriek and charged, the Thestral lunged too, sharp teeth meeting in nothing as the Dementor which had had hold of him blew away like a dark leaf, and Luna flung the door open, hurled herself out of the carriage and was up and onto the Thestral's back almost without touching the ground, leaving her wand in Severus's startled grasp. He leaned out of the other door, gripping the door-frame with one hand and the wand with the other, and cast and cast as the silver hare faded away and Luna kicked her heels into the Thestral's sides and steered it blindly into the thickest of the mist, the carriage rattling and bouncing behind and the doe-that-was-Lily racing with them, now on this side and now on that, her slender legs glimpsed folding and unfolding through the freezing fog, devouring the distance in great, reaching strides.

A razor chill developed between Severus's shoulder-blades and something picked hopefully at the edges of his soul, reminding him that he had driven Lily away with his disgraceful prejudices, with his stupidity, he had it on the best authority that he was disgusting and Lily had been right to reject everything he was or would ever- whirling, he saw the mouldering hands, reaching for him, heard the rattling breath that stank of the grave and pressed himself back against the door as he realised that the thing was _inside_ the carriage with him, filling the space from floor to ceiling; its shoulders were at the roof and its head was craning down to greet him. What little blood he had froze in his veins; its moist sucking mouth was searching for his and he dared not call the doe back to defend him and leave Luna alone and wandless; he was trapped and helpless as he had been in Azkaban, waiting for that ultimate, intimate slobbering kiss -

Shoving the thing away with his mind and aiming a hefty kick at it for good measure, he knew with an iron certainty that if he was too disgusting and dark for even Lily's light to dispel him, then he was far too dark and too powerful for this scabby apology for an Anthropomorphic Personification to handle... "Fuck you!" he sneered as the Dementor billowed back away from him, wariness and doubt in every clammy lineament, and then there was a bang and a flash like fireworks and a river of silver poured through the carriage in a glittering rush of hooves and horns and wings, and swept the monster away through the door opposite.

Severus fell to his knees, gasping and giddy and shuddering with desperate cold, knocked sideways out of the world. With remote detachment he saw his own hands braced against the floor of the carriage, the spread fingers as translucent as porcelain and a pattern of bellflowers pulsing in and out under the whiteness, and beyond _that_ he could see out and down into the Head's office, ninety degrees rotated from where his inner ear told him it ought to be, and Quincy Dobson talking urgently to someone whose face was wavering in the Floo. He hung his own head, trying not to heave, as the Thestral jangled to a snorting halt and the suspension dipped and rose under him as someone scrambled in through the open door.

He recognised the knees which folded down on the floor beside him, the robes - hauled himself upright, wheezing, trying to clear the fog from his lungs. Luna was on the floor next to him - she had come, he realized, to make sure he was all right but the cold sweat was rolling off her and her pale skin was whiter than his own. Making an unsteady grab for her shoulder he used her as a prop to stabilize himself as he lurched to his feet, and then grabbed her by the upper arms and hauled her upright before gravity caught up with him, and they both folded untidily down onto one of the seats.

"All right in here?" said a cheerful voice, and Severus raised his head, carefully, to see one of the Aurors who had - he belatedly realized - rescued them, leaning in through the door. Outside, he could hear crisp voices giving orders and casting spells, mopping up the remainder of the Dementors. He nodded, cautiously, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Luna flash the uniformed witch a wobbly smile.

"Aalll righ'" he slurred, blurring his words, but it was better than the stammer he had to lock his jaw to prevent. The Auror ducked aside for a moment and came back holding out a thick slab of chocolate, which Severus snatched and broke in trembling hands, pressing the lion's share on Luna who was, he realized numbly, huddled against his side, shivering convulsively. He was frozen himself, he could scarcely even imagine warmth, but his continuing physical weakness meant that he at least had been sent out well-wrapped and he shifted enough to fold his heavy travelling cloak around both of them, conserving what little body-heat they might both have left as they wolfed down the dark, bitter squares.

As the theobromine hit his blood-stream Severus could feel his panic-constricted blood-vessels beginning to relax, and he saw that a touch of colour had returned to Luna's cheeks. "How - how many?" he asked and the Auror, understanding, replied: "Well over twenty, at least. They're getting cleverer: seems like they realized we'd be guarding the Express so they waited until it was away and we'd all started to relax and disperse, and then made a two-pronged attack on Hogsmeade and the staff at the castle." She grimaced. "We didn't realize there was a carriage on the road as well until Mr Hagrid warned us. It was lucky you were able to outrun most of them, or we might not have got to you before - well."

"It wasn't luck," Luna said severely, shaking herself into some sort of order and wrapping the end of Severus's cloak more firmly about herself. "It was knowing how to ride and Mr... Partridge keeping them mostly off me while I was doing it." She proffered most of the remaining chocolate to the Auror. "Give this to the Thestral, please. I presume you can see him? I don't think Dementors can affect his mind, but they can still make him cold, so he'll need the extra energy."

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Arriving in Hogsmeade, they were ushered into the Post Office, which had been turned into a temporary office for the Aurors; leaving the Thestral to rattle the carriage away down the cobbles of the high street on his own, taking it back to the coachyard to be put away until it was needed again. The clerk from the Aurory took them briskly through a series of questions about the attack, but his glance kept straying back to Severus and his expression was thoughtful.

At least they had only to go out into the street and up the side-stair next door. As they stepped outside a shadow passed over them, much too large to be an owl: Severus jerked his head up in fright to see the Thestral sail overhead in a leathery clap of wings. Hard behind it came a bang and a flash and he threw his hand up, too late, to cover his face - no-not-an-attack, not a wand but what was almost worse: a photographer wearing the sash of the _Daily Prophet_ and an annoyingly cheerful smile.

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The sofa almost seemed to exert a sucking force, pulling him down with its own personal gravity as he collapsed back onto its yielding bulk. He felt fragile as paper, almost too weak to move; the cold still seemed to have embedded itself in his bones and he was absurdly grateful when Luna fussed a thick, warm throw-cover around him, covering him from shoulders to toes, and lit the fire with a flick of her wand.

"You stay there," she said serenely, "and I'll make us some hot chocolate."

It sounded wonderful, Severus thought hazily; right now he could think of nothing he wanted more than to sink back into the cushions, and warm the bitter remembered chill of Azkaban away with a long hot drink and the kindness of a friend. But Lovegood was - had been - his student and she too had been exposed to the Dementors; she must just have had to relive the death of her mother and who knew what horrors suffered while she was in the hands of the Dark Lord, and it was his place to look after and protect her, not _vice versa_.

"I should - _I_ should" he muttered, attempting to struggle to his feet, but Luna placed her small firm hand against his chest and pushed him back down onto the sofa with embarrassingly little effort.

"I'm only a year younger than you, now," she said, nodding to herself, "and besides, you've been ill."

"I've been _dead_!" he snarled in sudden anger, impatient with euphemism, and the blonde woman pursed her lips.

"Yes, well," she said, and raised her almost-invisible, ash-pale eyebrows at him. "I'd say that counted as pretty ill, wouldn't you?"

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Breakfast the next morning was interrupted by an urgent Floo-call from Hermione, who had seen that morning's _Prophet_ and could not rest until she had proved with her own eyes that they were both relatively undamaged. The newsagent's owl chose that moment to soar through the open window and deposit the paper in question into the butter.

Severus paused open-mouthed, his toast and marmalade halfway to his lips. Even from this angle he could see the headline: _"DEMENTORS RAID HOGSMEADE, 3 KISSED"_, and then below that in slightly less screaming letters, _"P. 3 - who is Mystery Man with"_ - he fished the paper out of the butter and wiped it down with a corner of the tablecloth before reading past the fold - _"eccentric heiress?"_

"...should have _told_ me," Hermione's voice complained, and Luna said something emollient in reply, but he was too preoccupied to pay them much attention. The main report was, fittingly, about the raid on Hogsmeade itself -

_"...while the great majority of the Aurors stationed in the village were overseeing the safe departure of the Hogwarts Express, at a point when they had begun to disperse from Hogsmeade train-station but had not yet resumed their regular posts in the village, some 70 Dementors attacked in force... Aurors rushed to defend the village and the school... Two passengers in a carriage on the Hogwarts-Hogsmeade road had a narrow escape..."_

- but altogether too much prominence, in his personal opinion, had been given to the side-story, which was headed: _"Severus Snape's secret son?"_

_"Eccentric newspaper heiress Luna Scamander, née Lovegood (37), was one of two passengers who narrowly escaped with their souls after becoming trapped by Dementors in a Thestral-drawn carriage on the Hogwarts-Hogsmeade road. The panic-stricken pair were escorted to safety after Mrs Scamander made a failed attempt to escape on Thestral-back, leaving her companion (pictured, right) to face the Dementors alone. _

_"Who is the Mystery Man in Slytherin colours seen with Mrs Scamander? Eye-witnesses say that he bore a remarkable resemblance to the late Death Eater turned war hero Severus Snape, who was supposedly killed in the final hours of the Battle of Hogwarts (May 1998). Did Snape have a secret son? Was Mrs Scamander's clandestine lover Polyjuiced to resemble the plain-featured yet striking Slytherin hero? _

_"Or, most intriguing of all, did Snape somehow survive, to return to wizarding Britain years later? Marks on the Mystery Man's neck (circled, right) resemble wounds left by..."_

To the right of the article an enlarged detail showed his own pale, scrawny neck, the twin pink smudges of new scars just visible above the green and silver scarf, alongside a sample image of himself in teaching robes, taken (he thought) during the preparations for the Triwizard Tournament. Himself scowled at himself in mirrored disdain. Above that, he and Luna emerged out of the shadowed doorway into the light and flung their heads up to watch the Thestral soar overhead, over and over in an endless loop. His own face, he supposed, was ageless: thin and drawn, he could as easily have been fifty-eight as thirty-eight, aside from the ink-black hair, and he wouldn't be the first wizard to use artifice in that regard: so he could see why the _Prophet_ might think that he was, indeed, himself.

He had not realized until now that as he and Luna stepped out of the comparative darkness of the Post Office and into the street, they had been holding hands.

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"So it's true," the face in the flames said, and it took Severus an effort of will to recognise the lined, deflated features as Horace Slughorn's, twenty years on. Even the moustache was losing the struggle with gravity. "I wondered if the _Prophet_ was inventing again, but you are... who, exactly?"

"I..." and he couldn't think what to answer, any simple reply would be misleading and he could neither deny being Snape, nor fully lay claim to him. "Ask Lionel Carver," he finished flatly. "I know you know him, I remember he was..." _in the Slug Club two years above me_, but he couldn't make his mouth say it.

"Ah." The name obviously meant something significant to the old man, for he huffed the 'tache out and let it deflate, thoughtfully. "Not Polyjuice, then?"

"No. I am..."

"Healer Carver's theory was proved correct," Luna said firmly, coming to stand beside him, "at least on this occasion, but he has chosen not to go public about it yet in case - well, Professor Snape may be a special case."

"So..." Slughorn looked uneasy; embarrassed even. "May I - er...?" At Luna's nod, he moved up and forwards as the fireplace first magically expanded to accommodate him, and then shrank back down again behind him as he stepped into the room. He gave Luna a rather watery smile and then held out his hand to Severus, who shook it warily and without conviction.

Horace harrumphed through his moustache. "So..." he said again. "Do you find that you are...?"

"Yes, I find that I _am_" Snape said sharply, "which is - bloody unexpected, but as to _what_ I am... God knows. I certainly don't."

"But you are... well, you certainly sound like Severus."

"Waspish and bad-tempered," Luna agreed happily. "It's great, isn't it? - to have him back, I mean."

Severus grimaced, not sure how to take either fondness or what was clearly well-meant teasing. "Sit down Horace, do."

The old man huffed his moustache again and limped to the sofa, where he lowered himself stiffly and with caution. His sea-coloured eyes watched Severus unhappily over the cup of tea which Luna poured for him.

"What?" Severus asked uneasily.

"He's still not sure you're you," Luna said brightly, "and if you're _not_ you then seeing you being nearly you upsets him because he misses the you-you, and if you are you he doesn't know how to be happy to see you because he's got so used to mourning you."

"Ah - quite," Horace mumbled, spraying tea. "In a manner of speaking, don'cha know." He reached absentmindedly for a biscuit and dunked it in his cup.

"It's all right," Severus said, taking pity on him. "I - ah - caught up on the memories that my portrait has accumulated, so we don't have to go through it again." In his recollection of his portrait's recollection the old man he had last seen bustling up the corridor as Minerva drove him into outer darkness wept, out there in the solid world beyond the frame, declaring that he himself would never have joined in in attacking him, and he nearly believed it.

[Once, long ago, a scrawny little half-blood brat had listened to his mother's stories about the Hogwarts Potions master who was sure to advance the careers of clever little boys, and he had set his heart on Slytherin and on a new sort of father who would encourage rather than clout him: and if the old walrus hadn't quite been all that he had hoped, he'd certainly been a vast improvement on Tobias.]

Horace fished out a large silk handkerchief and blew his nose resoundingly. "Yes, well. I was all ready to share my great moment of triumph with you - me! Duelling the Dark Lord! - and then he said that he had killed... and it was all too late. It was too late forever."

"And now it's not," Luna said serenely. "Of course, it never was - you could always have talked to him again when you died."

"I'm never sure whether I believe...?"

"It certainly seems so," Severus replied carefully. "If I am - who I feel to myself to be, and my recollections are genuine, then there has been..." The obscure sheaf of images in the back of his head rustled like wings, spreading a little and then folding down again. "I do not have a clear memory of what passed between my death and my... reflorescence, but I am able to know that this is because my memory of events is clouded, rather than because there were no events to recall." Without thinking about it, he made an automatic grab, born of a year's shared experience in the staff room before his dual rôles of headmaster and scapegoat had exiled him to his high cold tower, and snaffled the last biscuit before Horace could hoover it up. "Did you really duel with...?"

"Oh yes," the older man said happily. "In m' jimjams, y'know. Green silk!"

"How very... Gryffindor of you." With a sharp pang he thought that it wasn't fair that even Horace had got to strike a physical blow against Lily's killer whilst he himself had not: but he knew that he had struck other and greater blows, and Horace had loved her too.

"Hah - no, it was an um, a family thing, you know we - mmm - pure-bloods have our ah, traditions and the Slughorns are - were - well, famous warriors. Traditionally."

"It's in the name, isn't it?" Luna said brightly, and when Severus raised his eyebrows at her she nodded. "Yes - Slughorn - it's an old way of spelling 'slogan' as in an, um, battle-cry. Of course," she added, still more perkily, "many people think that Slytherin's original war-trumpet was made from the horn of the Giant Man-Eating Madagascan Slug but I don't believe that myself. I mean, it would have to be a sort of tanned leather, wouldn't it, and I don't think it would produce a very good note..." Severus and Horace exchanged eye-contact, shiftily.

"Yes, well." Horace cleared his throat noisily, and gave the younger man a measuring look. "I would be delighted if you - both of you, that is, m'dear," with a nod to Luna, "would join me for dinner soon when you are... feeling better."

"Eager to show off your latest curio, are we?" Severus said cattily. "Just us and few dozen well-connected sight-seers?" God, he must look bad if even Horace thought he looked too ill to be put on display yet.

"I won't deny the thought has crossed my mind," Horace replied blandly. "It wouldn't hurt you to... socialize yourself with the right people, especially since you are twenty years out of touch. But I do, sincerely want to - to see more of you, without distractions at the moment. I have..." To Severus's embarrassment, the grey-green eyes misted over visibly. "I really have missed you, m'boy, and besides, if Healer Carver isn't ready to go public yet..."

He frowned and looked away, breaking eye-contact. "Severus..." he said softly, "do you, ah, have your wand back yet?"

"No it -" Severus broke off, gripped by a sudden deep shudder, then forced himself to go on. "...buried with me," he ground out, trying to keep his teeth from chattering, "and I don't think, after twenty years in the ground, that it would be in a fit state - why?"

"Thanks to - to Potter and the Skeeter woman, the whole world knows what you did for us, m'boy, but not everybody is, ah, grateful. Not all of Tom's followers were, ah, rehabilitated or, um, contained, as well as the... Dementor problem."

"Ah. And now, thanks to the _Prophet_, they know where - and that - I live..."

"Quite. If, ah, money is an issue, I'd be happy to finance..."

"That's very kind of you, Professor," Luna said seriously, "but Sandy - Mr Ollivander - has offered to provide Severus with a wand free of charge. In recognition of his services to the free world, also because I asked him to. We're going to see him tomorrow."

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"Most impressive," the old wandmaker murmured, his moon-like silver eyes peering at Severus through a spidery lorgnette, and from an uncomfortably close range. "_Most_ impressive..." Severus had last glimpsed Ollivander six subjective months ago: a torn and bloodied skeleton, sobbing and pleading in agony in the basement of Malfoy Manor and he had wished desperately that he could have helped the man, or put an end to his pain - but it was difficult to maintain that gut-deep, flinching guilt and compassion when he had the uneasy feeling that he was being examined for visible seams.

Ollivander sighed happily, evidently satisfied with the quality of the work before him. "My dear sir! A living, breathing, walking revenant - the wand that will suit you now will have to be... extraordinary!"

Since Luna's good friend Sandy looked like an extremely spry and agile mummy himself, Severus thought sourly that he was a fine one to talk about other people being walking-dead. "I've never known," he said uncomfortably, "why it isn't possible to make statues of the dead that walk and talk like portraits - since we can make statues of fictional subjects and give them some kind of life. But it's not really my field, despite..."

"Ah, yes," the other man said, tucking the lorgnette away and steepling his fingers; "the resurrection of the dead has always been a _great_ interest of mine." [_Amazing,_ Severus muttered under his breath; _I never would have guessed._] "You see that the, ah, the world which is accessed through the portraits seems to be a special case of what I believe Muggles call the _Astral_, or of Death's Kingdom, if you will. A portion of the subject's soul is called into the border-realm defined by the painting and confined there, so that they can interact with the living, but they remain in Death's Kingdom and not in ours. Whereas an animated statue is a creature wholly of our world, and it is not normally possible to cross the _boundary_ between here and there. That is what makes your own case... unique."

He gazed at Severus with the ecstatic expression of a bird-watcher spotting a rare Andean finch on Bodmin Moor, and Luna smiled indulgently at both of them. Severus, who was more used to creeping other people out than to being the creepee, retreated behind his hair and glowered.

"Yes, well," Ollivander said fussily, "About that wand... now let me see, your last was, I believe, a - 'legacy' wand, am I right?"

"If you mean that it was second-hand, yes." But there had been no legacies involved, he remembered glumly: his mother had bought it for four Sickles off a stall in Knockturn Alley, like it or lump it.

"As I thought... now, hawthorn I think, to start..."

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The experience should have been a significant milestone: finally he was getting to choose his own shiny mint-new wand in Ollivander's famous shop, like normal boys and girls, even if he had had to pass through the far side of death to do so. The bright, dusty little room with its floor-to-ceiling shelves piled high with wands had been the gateway to the wizarding world for Lily and Granger and who-knew-how-many other Muggle-borns and Muggle-raised half-bloods, although for him it had been as marvellous and unattainable as the shop-front at Hamleys. But as wand after wand failed to respond to him even as well as Luna's had done, Severus became progressively more despondent.

Finally he flung up his hands in despair. "It can't be that I can't do magic at all in this - this new form, because I cast a Patronus during the Dementor attack. But perhaps the Dementors sucked out what little power was left."

"I do not believe so, no, although there might be a... temporary disablement. But I think that it is rather..." He pursed his lips thoughtfully. "Having become accustomed, perhaps, to using a wand that had been used by another wizard before you... and I did say, something out of the ordinary..."

He padded away down a passage into the mysterious depths behind the front shop, leaving Severus to slouch in the corner, hoping that the thin, translucent blue curtain at the window was enough to keep him out of sight of the few early-morning passers-by in the street outside. "You should sit," Luna said quietly, standing up and offering him the one rather rickety chair, but Severus shook his head.

"I'm all right."

A minute or two later Ollivander returned, bearing in reverent hands a wooden, brass-bound cylinder of the kind which might be used to house a telescope. Pulling a small, fold-down counter out from under one of the lower shelves, he laid the cylinder down and carefully unscrewed the cap, to reveal a velvet-padded interior the deep green of a yew tree.

"Cherry, thirteen inches, with a core of twisted Thestral tail-hairs," he murmured, drawing out the wand at the core of the sturdy case. "This belonged to Meraud Cadwallader, the Cornish witch who in 1632 almost single-handedly defended Tinworth from a raiding party of Barbary slavers mounted on dragon-back. It wasn't buried with her in the traditional manner because there wasn't, ahem, anything to actually _bury_..." he finished delicately.

Severus stared at the wand dubiously. It was a rich light brown that was almost pink - the last thing he would consciously have chosen - fairly chunky for its length, and marred by a long, blackened scorch. His first feeling towards it was unease, antipathy - when he picked it up and held it gently in his hand his palm itched almost as if he were holding a nettle. But when he closed his fingers and bore against it with his will, the itch turned to a jolt of power and wild force which lashed across the room and scored a deep gouge across the inside of the door. He embarrassed himself by yelping in shock, and then tried to disguise it as a cough.

"Marvellous!" Ollivander exclaimed, heedless of the damage to his property, and Luna clapped her hands like the audience at a play. Severus pushed again, cautiously and with control, willing a silent _Reparo_, and the score across the woodwork smoothed itself away.

"That, ah, seems to be satisfactory," he muttered, still feeling that electric itch in his palm. "But surely this must be... too valuable, I couldn't -"

"It is priceless - in both senses. To whom would I sell it? The wand has chosen you, and I insist that you let her do so. It is the least that I could do - some small recompense for the sacrifice that you made for all of us."

"It's very - good of you," Severus said awkwardly, "to do this, especially as... as I wasn't able to help you - before."

Ollivander nodded soberly. "It was - very bad," he said huskily, "but I know that you had - more pressing considerations. And after this wonderful girl here" - he clapped his bony hand down heavily on Luna's shoulder - "after this wonderful girl came to join me, then my circumstances improved... immeasurably."

"I suppose that to have company..."

"Not that only. She was actually able to prevent them from torturing me further."

_"How?"_ Severus exclaimed, startled out of composure, and Luna smiled a strange, inwards smile, the corners of her mouth tucking in in quiet amusement.

"I just looked at them," she said. "Like this." She transfixed him with a level, measuring regard, simultaneously penetrating and detached, as if he were a biological specimen of only moderate interest. After a few seconds, he could feel his mouth start to go uncomfortably dry. "And then they stopped; even Mr Riddle. It seemed to make them forget what they'd been going to do."

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"It's extraordinary," he said, turning the new/old wand over in his hands and examining it in the light of Luna's big, Hogwarts-facing window. "I suppose that in reality, the wand I had before never was truly suited to me, and so without realising it I was exerting an unusual amount of force to make it work. Now I shall have to be careful not to blow my own boots off by mistake - or Transfigure my feet, like that chap in the play. It's probably just as well I'm still a bit below par."

"When you're well," Luna said, smiling, "you can teach me to fly. We can fly all the way to the Owl Tower, and talk to Blodeuwedd's grand-chicks."

"It's more of a glide," he said honestly. "The - _Mr Riddle_ could fly with real control, he could soar as high as he liked, create his own wind - and I don't mean he farted it! At least, I don't think so... But I never did manage to get much lift. What I do - it's more like controlled falling, and never quite hitting the ground until you're ready to."

"Then you can teach me how to not hit the ground," she said gravely. "Until I'm ready to."

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**Author's note:**

To "measure your length" is to fall full-length onto the floor.

_Doppelgänger_ (double goer) is a German word for a ghost-like double of a living person; in modern terms probably an astral projection, or what is called in Scotland a "fetch". It's moot whether the portrait is flower-revenant!Severus's _doppelgänger_, or _vice versa_.

"Haar" is a Scots word for fog, usually for fog that rolls in off the sea.

"The Floo'ers o' the Forest are a' wede away" - 18th C Scots song, based on an earlier original, lamenting the loss of life at the battle of Flodden Field in 1513.

The phrase "Anthropomorphic Personification" was invented, or at least popularised, by Terry Pratchett to describe the Death of the Discworld, and any other mythological being which personifies a natural force or condition in human form. The Dementors are loosely human-shaped personifications of depression.

Jimjams is a slang term for pyjamas.

Hamleys is a massive, famous multi-storey toy-shop in central London.

It's a little-known historical fact that as well as being involved in taking slaves in central and southern Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries, from the late 16th to the early 18th centuries Britain was actually a target for slave-raiders from North Africa, and many sailors and coastal villagers from Cornwall and Ireland were captured and carried away.

Readers who like the little owls and want to know how to create these and other fancy section-breaks, or how to handle FFN's text-editing system, can find them on my FFN How-To page at **www. whitehound. co. uk / Fanfic / ffn_how-to. htm**


	8. 07 Auld Lang Syne

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

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**7: AULD LANG SYNE**

Horace Slughorn might have been the first auld acquaintance to attempt to make contact, but he was by no means the last. The run-in with the Dementors had occurred on a Saturday and had been reported in the _Sunday Prophet_, which not everybody took owing to its bulk which required the services of an eagle-owl; and in any case the wizarding world was old-fashioned enough still to regard Sunday as a day of peace and privacy - a pause before the hurly-burly of the week to come. But on Monday morning the story was re-issued in the weekday edition even as Severus was getting to grips with his new wand, and by Monday afternoon he was more in demand than he was at all comfortable with - even though Luna had taken the precaution of warding the Floo so that nobody could actually enter through it, or fire a wand through it, without her permission.

The first disturbance was just after a late, post-Ollivander brunch, as Severus was moodily Transfiguring cereal-bowls into bowling balls and back again. Neville Longbottom's round, anxious face appeared suddenly in the flames at knee-height, startling Severus so much that he lost control of his latest creation, which rolled off the table onto the floorboards and shattered into metallic-looking china shards.

"Oh um, sorry Hea-Sn-Severus" this apparition mumbled as the older man tried to get the pieces to make up their minds what they were and reassemble; "'lo Luna - Hermione said you were OK but I wanted to see for myself and, um, thought you'd like to know that Minerva is asking after you both and would really like to talk to Severus as soon as she can."

Severus let his hair fall forwards over his face as he Summoned the mended soup bowl - which still had three finger-holes in it - and laid it carefully on the table, where Luna stuck her fingers through the holes and waggled them happily. Today, she was wearing a necklace made from carefully graded colours and sizes of snail-shells. "Does she - does she realise what I am?"

"Mmm, I think your - your portrait explained it all to her."

"Ah." He remembered that Minnie had inexplicably commissioned a small portrait of himself so he could visit her in her retirement. He wondered whether he ought to get such a portrait made for himself and carry it with him, so his two selves could always stay in touch - but would the mind that informed a new portrait be the portrait-self that already existed, split away from the original Severus at the point of his death as it had been, or would it show the person he was now, and remain almost inert until this new self died in its turn to leave him forever bifurcated, even in the portrait realm? He could feel a cold shudder of nausea beginning somewhere under his artificial, recreated breastbone, and his head was beginning to throb. "I - I don't think -"

He took a deep breath. "It's not that I bear her any ill will" - he didn't, he didn't, she had only believed of him what he had wanted her to believe and she had hated him because she had thought that their partial friendship had been a lie all along - that the colleague she had sparred with over tea and biscuits in the staff-room had never been real, but only a glib mask over something terrible. But even if he had been the deceiving betrayer in Riddle's service that she had thought him (instead of the deceiving betrayer in Dumbledore's service that he had really been), the accusation of cowardice would still have been grossly unfair and it ate at his gut, even though he knew that his other self had come to quite warm terms with her. But his painted self was simplified, less conflicted, and it had had nineteen years to deal with a raw pain which for him was less than two weeks ago. "I just -"

"Tell her not yet, Neville," Luna said calmly. "He needs more time to get his bearings first - especially after Saturday, with the Dementors I mean."

"He needs to put his memories back in, if he hasn't already," Neville muttered. "I'm sorry si- Severus, but there's been research. Leaving memories out too long isn't good for your - um, stability." The thought that Severus's stability had never been much to write home about at the best of times hung, unspoken yet lit up in lights, in the air between them.

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The second caller was a fresh-faced, annoyingly bouncy young man who announced that he was Hereward "Hawk-Eye" Hunter, a reporter with the _Daily Prophet_. "tried to call on you earlier this morning," he chattered brightly, "but you were out."

"Imagine that I am still out," Severus replied balefully, and swept from the room.

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It took some time to get the measure of the ancient wand, so that he was neither bearing on it too hard nor holding back and crippling himself. It had, nearly literally, a mind of its own: shaped to another's hand it had its own biases including a tendency to pull to the left, if he didn't jam his thumb against it; but once he had learned to temper his own energy just right, it channelled his will with a force and purity which was as disturbing as it was exhilarating. Every new thing, every difference from his old life, however benign, reminded him of the vast dislocation he had suffered and called his own authenticity into question.

On the other hand, the things which had not changed could be pretty disturbing too. The third person to Floo-call Luna's flat that day was Draco Malfoy. Nowadays many houses, Severus had been told, had special talking-Floos set into the wall at chest-height but Luna was away from her flat so often that she had not bothered to have one fitted, leaving Draco with his head sticking out of the flames at shin-height even though he might well be standing up, on the other side of the fire. It made Severus feel at once both excessively old and unexpectedly young to see that his handsome godson now had a definite receding hairline, while he himself was still as shaggy as a spaniel. But the sharp features and waspish expression were as they had ever been, and the pale eyes measured him warily.

"Good afternoon, Draco," Luna said happily, pre-empting the moment, and suddenly-middle-aged-Draco wrenched his gaze away from his godfather and said "Oh, ah, yes. Scamander. I must apologise"

"Must you?" she said brightly. "It's quite natural you know - that you'd want to speak to him."

"Yes, well I had to see if - look, don't mind me saying, but who the hell _are_ you?"

Severus tucked the wand carefully into his belt and frowned at the carpet, avoiding his godson's silver gaze. "I am - that is, I am intended to be - who I look like. Whether I am the real Severus Snape, or merely a very good copy, I have no way of telling, but I have at least some of his memories. I remember -" He looked up then, searching for a memory which was personal and private enough to prove his identity, without embarrassing Draco beyond measure in front of company. It wouldn't do, for example, to mention the stack of girlie mags which had stretched the canopy over the boy's bed into a tell-tale belly. "Look, this is ridiculous - come through, do, if?"

He looked at Luna questioningly and she nodded and made a sharp gesture with her wand, opening the wards to allow Draco to scramble through onto the hearth although he still stood with his back against the mantel, rigid with suspicion. Severus noted, with a mixed pang of both sorrow and smugness, that thirty-eight-year-old Draco was beginning to thicken a bit about the middle, while he himself was still whip-thin.

"In your second year," Severus said, "you boasted openly about how Slytherin's Heir and his pet monster would be no threat to pure-bloods like the Malfoys, but when I walked up behind you quietly and cleared my throat you screamed -"

"I exclaimed!"

"You started away from me so hard you bruised your shoulder against the door-frame and had to be sent to Madam Pomfrey."

"You were always creeping about -" They eyed each other warily.

After a moment - "You can't be," the other said flatly. "How can you be? Severus - Severus would be nearly sixty and he - Potter said you were dead. The _Dark Lord_ said you were dead, and he was an expert on dead things." He flinched slightly, and shuddered.

"I was dead." Severus studied his own hands as if they were suddenly fascinating. "And now I'm alive, or something is. It was - an experiment, but the details are meant to be classified for the moment. They made a new body and animated it using memory and blood from the original but whether that means I _am_ the original, even as much as a painting is, I'm not sure. I feel real to myself, but I doubt if that can be considered proof."

"How - how long -"

"Eleven days ago. And I was." He felt the need to explain his silence, why he hadn't contacted his godson at once. "They brought me back as I was - with half my throat torn out." Unconsciously he put his hand up and touched the paired scars - the twin knots where the fangs had gone in, and then the long, ragged ridges where they had torn their way out again, opening the jugular vein and giving him, the first time around, the mercy of rapid unconsciousness, and a slow convalescence the second time. "It's only been a few days since I've been well enough to be out of bed." Overcome by the realisation, he moved so he could lean against the back of the sofa without it being obvious.

"My father," Draco said jerkily, "it wrecked him, more than he already was I mean. He always says he wouldn't have summoned you to the Dark Lord if he'd known - if he'd known He was planning to kill you. But you were always flavour of the bloody month, he never thought -"

"'Flavour of the month' was always ripe to be eaten. I can hardly believe."

"Mrs Malfoy saved Harry's life," Luna said in her best dreamy voice. "If she hadn't, the Death Eaters would have eaten the whole world. He - the Dark Lord, that is - he told her to check that Harry was dead and she lied and said he was when she knew he wasn't." She smiled brightly. "Of course, she did it really because she thought Draco would be safer if Harry won than if Mr Riddle did, but a lot of people chose sides, or changed them, according to what they thought was safest for people they cared about."

Severus winced, knowing that it had taken Lily's danger to crystallise his unease about the Dark Lord's methods into action, and Luna gave him a tiny, conspiratorial smile. "Regulus Black, you know, " she said, "he wasn't a bad boy, and Harry said that Sirius said he hadn't realised what the Death Eaters were willing to do to get their own way until it was too late to back out, but he didn't actually turn against them until the Dark Lord showed he didn't care about the life of Regulus's favourite house-elf; and of course Regulus knew and Mr Riddle didn't, because he'd been raised by Muggles, that the loyalty between house-elves and their wizard family has to go both ways." This time it was Draco's turn to wince.

"My father," he muttered, "he'll want to - to see you, if you really are.... It would mean a lot to him."

His godfather stilled, then unfroze himself with an effort of will. "I'm not sure that that would be -" He had memories of Lucius Malfoy, both from school and from their time as Death Eaters together, which still haunted his dreams and made his skin try to crawl off his bones; yet the older man had shown him genuine patronage and had always seemed oblivious to the fact that his protegé might feel anything other than unalloyed gratitude for the attention - all the forms of attention - he had showered on a penniless half-blood. "He must know that I betrayed him, and all of them."

"He - well, the way things turned out, he can see your point. He realises that the Dark Lord was - well, insane."

"Familiarity bred contempt? Having the sodding psychopath actually in the family home getting blood on the nice expensive carpets was too much for him, was it?"

"Don't!" Draco shuddered. "We knew he sometimes killed but we had expected it to be - well, rational, a matter of military necessity, of strategy to achieve a goal: not just frothing and shooting people at random like Aunt Bellatrix just because he'd had a bad day. My parents were lucky to get out with their lives - sorry."

"Some of us weren't so bloody fortunate."

"Draco had a very bad time, though," Luna said in her don't-mind-me-I'm-not-really-here voice. "Mr Riddle used to make him practise torture curses on Sandy and he didn't like doing it at all, Sandy said, and tried not to do them too hard. That was before I came and looked at them, of course, but it must have been horrible for both of them."

"It was. He - he begged, pleaded -" Draco looked grey about the gills, and Severus's stomach lurched at the memory of Charity Burbage, hung by the heels and crying to him for a mercy he couldn't afford to show her. In the event the Dark Lord had at least killed her cleanly but Severus hadn't known in advance that he would do so: yet to answer her plea and finish her - the only mercy which was even within his power at that point - would have cost not only his own life, which he would have thrown away willingly, but his utility to the Order. Draco had been there too and seen one of his teachers killed and fed to the snake as his house-master watched impassively, although at least the boy had never been in Charity's class.

"If you had refused," Severus said roughly, "you still would not have saved Ollivander from pain. Once the Dark Lord had decided he should be hurt, he would have been: once he had fixed on a victim there was no turning him from his course." Luna made a sudden movement which drew his eye, and he tcch'd irritably. "At least, those of us who weren't valuable hostages and who hadn't perfected the art of 'looking at him funny' until it made him forget what he'd been thinking about had no way of turning him from his course."

Draco gave him an unhappy little smirk. "Some of us," he murmured, "are better equipped to 'look at people funny' than others. Those of us who were not...."

"I'm sorry," Severus muttered; "sorry that I wasn't there to help you to deal with - with afterwards."

"_I'm_ sorry. If I'd only known that you were - were injured I would have come, I would have tried - why didn't they bloody-well _do_ something, why did they just leave you there -?"

"There was nothing they could do," he said tiredly. "I've discussed it with Miss - with Mrs Weasley, and she did try whatever healing spells she knew, to no good effect; but they had used up their supply of dittany ointment when they were scalded earlier in the day. They already knew from what happened to Arthur Weasley that when Nagini bit with venom the wounds tended to keep on bleeding, and they had no timely way of obtaining either Blood-Replenishing Potion or anti-venin." And even the anti-venin would have taken time to work that they did not have, he knew. It had worked fast for Arthur, when the healers at St Mungo's had finally developed it, because by that point all the venom had left his system and it was simply a matter of repairing the damage; but he himself would have been left bleeding and choking and in need of days of continuing treatment as he had been, later, at Luna's flat.

He held up his hand as Draco opened his mouth to question him. "I had no reason to carry such things with me: it would have attracted suspicion if discovered, and frankly I expected that if the Dark Lord ever decided to kill me it would be either by a simple Avada Kedavra or by far more... protracted means. He did not often use Nagini actually to kill. And Potter and his friends - even if they had carried me outside, beyond the anti-Apparition wards, St Mungo's was in enemy hands and in any case they still believed that I probably intended them harm. The - _Voldemort_ had issued an ultimatum, and they had more pressing concerns than a probably futile attempt to save what they thought was an enemy."

"But to die alone like that...."

"Harry thought that the Headmaster was already dead when they left him," Luna said, and Severus nodded tiredly.

"I don't know if I was dead or not, but I was certainly unconscious by the time they left and I did not, so far as I recall, wake again to the living world until - well, as a portrait. Or eleven days ago, depending on how you look at it. And while I was conscious they were doing as I had told them, by some bloody miracle, and when they had finished doing as I had told them, only a second or two elapsed before they believed that I was dead, or at least beyond intervention.

"It was...." He pushed off from the sofa and paced a few steps. "I hadn't wanted to die, and I was in despair at the thought that I had failed, but then Potter came and I was able to do my duty and he was - surprisingly efficient and not - not hostile. It was...." He moved his head restlessly, easing his still-sore neck but also with a little preening lift of arrogance, of dark satisfaction. "It was a soldier's death, among allies."

"They - oh, this is surreal" Draco muttered, rubbing at his face. "They buried you in a soldier's grave, with so many flowers, enough to fill a garden - I'm going to wake up if I pinch myself I - ow."

"Apparently not." The idea that he had been mourned, even celebrated, made his ribs ache with confused pain, even as it soothed the hurt Minerva had inflicted. "I haven't been down to the churchyard: I don't know if I could bear to see...."

"Oh, you're not buried _here_," Luna said. "Didn't we tell you? Harry made sure you were buried in Godric's Hollow."

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After making confused apologies to Draco, and managing to sidle out of promising to speak to Lucius and Narcissa anytime soon, Severus blundered out into the hallway, feeling disoriented and dizzy. Being out of his place and time and forced forwards into an alien world was comparatively easy to cope with, since he had never felt at home anywhere anyway; but the idea of his own corpse, left behind and rotting back into earth, gave him a sickening sense of being balanced somewhere high and precarious with nothing to hold on to. He had always been sure of who and what he was, even if his idea of himself was jaundiced; but now every shadow that flickered across his skin made him think of flowers, made him fear that he might melt at any moment, and he did not even know who or what would be lost if he did.

He wondered if Longbottom had been right. Would he feel saner, more real, if he drank the bitter brew of memory? He recalled enough to know that all of those memories would cut him like knives: one way or another they had all warped his life in pain, but if he truly was Severus Snape then he was the thing those memories had made of him and without them he was incomplete. And even if he was only a copy of the original Severus, he could at least be a complete one.

With senses sharpened by years of terror and danger he heard Luna, behind him, rise to her feet and start to come after him, only to be interrupted by a syrupy voice he recognised with alarm to be that of Rita Skeeter, older and huskier by twenty years of gin and cigarettes but still unmistakeable. He had already glanced uneasily - no, _queasily_ through a copy of Skeeter's hagiography and seen himself presented as some sort of virginal Arthurian knight, a selfless martyr cloaking his "noble, bleeding soul" within a shell of bitterness and pain, allowing himself to be used and abused by Dumbledore out of what the author seemed to think was some darkly erotic need to be punished, and living and, at the last, dying with no thought or motive but his "burning devotion to the memory of she who had been his light and hope, who had given him the only joy he had ever known in this vale of tears".

The fact that it was, if you squinted at it and glossed over the "virginal" bit, fairly close to the truth just made it worse. Having spent his life secretly longing for sympathy and understanding whilst persuading himself he didn't need it, he felt cheapened to receive it at last and find it so tawdry and, well, _sticky_. And whoever he was now, he knew Severus Snape well enough to know that the man had had far more pep and vinegar and spite and texture than Ms Skeeter's sappy re-imagining.

Then again, Arthur's knights had probably been more interesting and textured in real life than they were in the stories - but he was quite certain that he didn't want his first public statement after his return from death to be given the Skeeter treatment. Hearing Luna trying unsuccessfully to put the blasted woman off, he was seized by a sudden irrational conviction that the journalist could sense him out in the hallway, even without using her wand - could hear his breathing, maybe, through the partially open door, and in a moment of claustrophobic panic he pushed open the nearest door on the other side of the hall and went through, putting as much distance as he could between himself and the _Prophet_'s best bloodhound.

He found himself in some kind of small study or office he hadn't seen before, lined with more of the same dark wood specimen-cases he had seen in the hall, with jars and bottles and filing cabinets and a desk bearing a magical enlarging-lens and something that looked like the bastard offspring of a Victorian steam-engine and a Muggle computer. He was about to back out of the room and make his apologies for the intrusion when he saw the pictures.

Most were on the wall he had come in through, so that he had not seen them until he half-turned to go out again. Somebody with considerable skill had painted them, although for the most part they were not animated, indicating that the subjects were still alive. There were many landscapes and animal subjects, some of them quite bizarre, but also several of human sitters; including one of a woman in her thirties closely resembling Luna herself, who smiled and waved, confirming her own death. He thought that he recognised her as a Slytherin who had been in seventh year when he was in first, and gave her a stiff, hesitant nod.

And there were Potter, Granger, Weasley and his sister, and Longbottom, all as they had been at about the time of the end of the war - Longbottom with ragged, singed locks straggling across his eyes, clutching the sword of Gryffindor and looking simultaneously heroic and acutely embarrassed. And there, Severus realised with a jolt, was himself: a strongly-drawn charcoal and pastel sketch of his own haggard, sleeping face, pale as milk against the equal pallor of the pillows on Luna's guest bed. The drawing was stuck to the wall above the desk, its corners decorated with bind-runes of healing and protection drawn on in thick, raised threads of gold wax.

On a table at the side of the room, a portfolio spilled open, displaying a fanned-out series of sketches of strange beasts - some of them probably the product of Luna's overwrought imagination, he thought, but others appearing to be drawn from life. Guiltily fascinated, he began to leaf through them, admiring the clean draughtsmanship and the clear, luminous colours. There was a small easel set up on the desk, he noticed, and by it several framed photographs all showing the same handsome twin boys aged between about three and eight years of age, their oval faces framed by identical feathery, red-blond hair. The artist had roughed out some different sketches of them, trying for an ideal pose.

"I'll be seeing them in a few weeks" Luna said, drifting up behind him, "and then I'll be able to paint from life, but I wanted to practise to be sure of getting them right."

Severus whipped round, opening his mouth to stammer an apology for his trespass, but an apology didn't seem to be required. Luna smiled at him and patted his arm. "I thought about telling Mrs Skeeter that you were a trained Boggart pretending to be you, but we don't want to annoy her - she might decide to 'monster' you when she found out I'd lied. Probably not, because she's invested so heavily in portraying you as a hero, but I didn't want to take risks; so I told her you were a Man of Mystery and I'd only known you for a few days, and I wasn't sure who you were because the Soul-Leeches had eaten your memory."

"That's... at least as true as most of the stuff she writes." He glanced awkwardly at the sketches of the two boys. "Are they...?"

"My sons," she said, with an inwards smile. "Lorcan and Lysander."

"You didn't - I didn't know you had children." That information had not been included when she had summarised her post-war life for him, but he didn't want to sound as if he was accusing her. Even if he was.

"I forgot," she said. "That you wouldn't have seen them, I mean - usually some of these photo's are in the sitting room, but I brought them in here to work from." He made a vague sound of dissatisfaction and she cocked her head at him. "I suppose I didn't tell you before - when I told you about being married, and then not being - because, well, I didn't want you to feel too sad. About not having a family."

"I have never - you can't seriously think I was ever cut out to be a father."

"Why not?" Luna said serenely. "Your Slytherins always spoke very highly of you. They always said you were quite kind really and surprisingly trusting."

"Did they now."

"Mm." She patted his hand. "Anyway the boys live with Rolf's parents in France, so they can get stability in their primary schooling - Rolf and I move around too much, with expeditions you know, and my father and stepmother have become rather... eccentric."

"You don't say." He made a conscious effort, forcing himself to unbend. "You said you were seeing them...?"

"Oh yes - they usually stay with me for five or six weeks over the summer holidays. They'll be coming over in three weeks. I need to get these -" she gestured at the sketches of unlikely beings "- finished and off to my publisher before then."

"They're very..." He struggled for an adjective that would express his admiration of her paintings without suggesting that he was surprised by her ability but his heart wasn't in it, knowing that he had just heard the limit of his own stay here. "Informative." And where on earth could he go then?

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The fifth caller was Lionel Carver, come to assess the health of his creation. By that point Severus had retired to bed for the afternoon, still physically and mentally exhausted by the horrible eleven months following Dumbledore's death which had ended, for him, less than a fortnight ago, as well as his own death and unlooked-for resurrection and now the brush with the Dementors. Sleep itself had always been a minefield but it was an unexpected luxury to be able to nap when he needed it, and the nightmares were less frequent and intense if he dozed during the afternoon.

In any case, sleep was an escape: a way out of having to think about where he would go once Luna's sons came to occupy her spare bedroom. The house at Spinner's End must have been sold or pulled down years since, and his rooms in the dungeons given over to another teacher; and he had no income with which to pay for bed or board. Perhaps Quincy Dobson would let him sleep in one of the empty rooms at the castle, at least until the students returned in September.

He woke to find the healer tut-tutting gently as he ran his wand back and forth over his patient's skull and torso, watching the quill which scribbled busily under its own power. "Good afternoon, Headmaster," the older man said, "and I think I can say with confidence that it _is_ good. You've had a remarkable escape, my dear sir - remarkable. Considering that some of your memories are still externalised, the risk of having your mind fragmented in the Dementor attack was very high, very high indeed - you must have a remarkable will. And if that happened, of course - well. The body would revert."

"To flowers, you mean." Outside, a gust of rain blew against the window, scattering it with drops.

"And stones, yes. Ordinarily - if a soul is stripped out of its body by a Dementor the body still has enough basic functions to survive if it is guided to feed itself, but in your case we think that the body is being held in shape by a template which exists in the soul, even though it behaves as if it had physical reality. Remove the template, and...."

"What would happen if I were to fall into a coma?"

"Oh, so long as the soul is still tied to the body there shouldn't be a problem, even if it were to, as it were, venture away from the flesh. It's only when the, ah, the cord joining the soul to the body is severed that there would be reality issues, but of course Dementors _do_ break the cord, in order to absorb the considerable amount of energy which is released when that occurs."

Severus shuddered, remembering the sucking mouth bending down to him from the roof of the carriage: a shiny new addition to his catalogue of night-time terrors. "I always understood that they ate the soul itself...."

"Ah yes, it used to be thought so, but - you'll understand that since your, ah, your death our little world has had a great deal of experience with uncontrolled Dementor attacks and the thinking now is that rather than devouring the soul they strip it of energy, turning it into something like an earth-bound ghost but without the strength left to manifest or to, ah, anchor itself."

Severus shivered again, and remembered that he had once threatened Black and Lupin with the Kiss. He had been sorely provoked, not to mention terrified half out of his mind, and had believed sincerely that Black had betrayed Lily to her death and then come back to finish the job by murdering her son, but even so....

Healer Carver patted him on the shoulder. "Of course," he said, "your case is unique: not only because of your status as what we are terming a 'whole-body replacement' patient, but also because you have both a living self and an animate portrait at the same time. It may be that even if you were to be Kissed, your portrait would serve to anchor you - would serve as a Horcrux, in fact, although the death which split you was your own."

"It's not an experiment I'm eager to try, believe me."

"Oh, nor am I. As fascinating as it would be, the risk to yourself...." He tucked his wand back into its holster, frowning. "I'm not sure if I should tell you this, Snape" - Severus looked up sharply, struck by that precise intonation which recalled their schooldays - "but I've always felt that I owed you a - a debt. An apology. When we were boys -"

"It doesn't matter," Severus said flatly. Lionel Carver had never been a friend, being far too conscious of their age and house difference to do anything but condescend to the younger boy, but nor had he been one of his tormentors - and there was no point in blaming him for having been a bystander, when there had been so many. Nor was he interested in opening old wounds just to salve this man's guilt.

"I fear that it did matter. Not only were we in the Slug Club together but I was a prefect - Ravenclaw - and I could and should have done more. Especially by the lake, when they -"

"When they hung me up and stripped me," Severus muttered, flushing dully at the thought that that miserable humiliation could still reach down through his life, even now, and expose him in front of this man, as it had exposed him in front of both the Potters, father and son. But the humiliation itself was blunted - the detailed memory of that searing day was in a bowl at the far end of the flat, leaving only a bleached outline of itself, and common sense told him that there was no point in worrying about his pathetic teenage body having been laid bare to the gaze of a healer who had later helped to reconstruct that body from the ground up, genitals and all. Realistically, Lionel Carver must know a great deal more about his body than he did, including the bits like behind the ears and under the balls that you couldn't really see for yourself.

"Yes, ah, quite," Carver said. "Of course, I was a seventh year, so I no longer had full prefect duties; I had just come out from an exam and I told myself that it was Remus Lupin's duty to intervene, not mine. But I should have known that he would not: I was afraid enough to antagonise Black and Potter myself, and I didn't have to share a dormitory with them. I should have stopped them or summoned a member of staff to do so, instead of skulking away."

"Yes. You should have." He shut his eyes, feeling suddenly deathly tired. He tried to summon rage, to feel that if only Carver had done his duty he might never have quarrelled with Lily and she might never have been killed - but it sounded as though the Ravenclaw prefect had only come on the scene as he was being stripped, and by then it had been already far too late.

"Ah, yes. Afterwards I was afraid that - well, that if I had intervened that day your life might have turned out differently and you might not have been killed, so I was delighted to have the chance to... put things right, perhaps."

"It will take a bloody sight more than that!"

"I fear so, yes. But at least you have a chance, and the world has a chance to thank you for your - your heroism and sacrifice. As it were."

"You shouldn't believe everything you read in books," Severus said darkly. "Have you practised this - experimental procedure on anyone else yet? When may I admit publicly to existing, if exist I must?"

"It is... difficult. Your own case was unusual in that by chance you gave a memory sample and a few drops of blood seconds before you, ah, died. Recreating that...." He scratched absent-mindedly at his ear with the point of his quill, leaving a smear of ink.

"I was surprised," Severus muttered, "that you made me without - without the memories I had given to Potter. Why were they not simply incorporated into -" He gestured rather numbly at his own torso. "This?"

"It was the - somatic memory that we needed, to reconstruct your body, and we thought - correctly as it turned out - that what we would get would be a Severus Snape who had already removed at least some of those narrative memories. If we poured them all into the reconstruction and it went wrong, then they would be gone: we might try again later and get a viable construct but the memories would be lost to you." He smiled awkwardly, making the ridiculous fluff over his ears waggle slightly. "We could have taken copies, of course, but there is always some degradation of detail, and I gather that they were very... formative memories. Better to be safe than sorry."

"Yes." Even the memory of those memories cut like shards of glass and he couldn't make up his mind whether he wanted to seize them to him like treasures or fling them as far away from him as he could, after the Wizengamot had trampled through them and exposed them to public view.

"As regards other subjects, we have taken simultaneous point-of-death memory and tissue samples from two patients with incurable diseases, but you will understand that by the very nature of their condition we will not seek to reconstruct them until a cure becomes available, and that could be decades away - or never. There's no point in experimenting on a non-verbal, sub-sentient model such as a rabbit or Kneazle because we wouldn't be able to get an accurate measure of how closely the revived soul resembled the deceased, and to experiment by killing and reviving a fully sentient being would be - unethical."

"So... basically, you have to wait until some unfortunate comes in who's so mangled you haven't got time to prepare the equipment needed to save them before they die."

"Quite. In that case we would take memory and tissue samples as the patient died, then prepare a theatre with all necessary equipment and potions and bring them back again - and hope to be able to keep them alive when we had done so. But such incidents are, perhaps fortunately, rare." Ignoring Severus's raised eyebrows, he fussed out another piece of parchment. "The technique is really intended for battlefield use and battles are, at the moment, in short supply. Now: Luna tells me that your magical force appears to be flowing well...."

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The sixth caller was Harry Potter. The first Severus knew about it was when Luna breezed into the bedroom without knocking and announced "Guess what: Harry is here!" in an offensively cheerful tone. He contemplated hiding under the bed-covers and pretending to be asleep, but that would be too much like running away. And he had already run from Skeeter today, but that was different: he had definite reason to think that an interview with her might be damaging, but Potter was merely disturbing, and he was damned if he was going to give the boy any reason to think that he really was a coward.

Slinging his robes back on, he shook his hair into rough order and advanced cautiously on the sitting room, where Potter was standing by the window, talking to Luna. The men eyed each other stiffly, like two wire-haired terriers. After a moment Potter cleared his throat. "Headmaster Snape" he said, managing to sound at once courteous and dubious.

Severus bared his teeth in something loosely resembling a smile. "Approximately."

Potter coughed, and Severus smirked to himself at his obvious discomfiture. "Yes, well, uhm, Hermione said that you... did seem to be you. If you see what I mean."

"Unfortunately 'seeming' and 'being' are not necessarily the same thing, and I have no objective way to tell - being inside myself. And to what do I owe the... pleasure of this visit?"

"Um, well; now that your return - or at least the suspicion of it - is common knowledge I need to discuss improved security arrangements with yourself and Luna."

"Merlin help us!"

"I am head of the bloody Aurory!" Potter snapped. "I do know what I'm doing!"

Severus eyed him balefully. The fact that Potter at thirty-seven was greying and badly in need of a shave reduced his resemblance to James and made it easier to look at him without flinching in dread, but the memory of how he had died (!) gazing into those grass-green eyes was mortifying. "The last time I saw you before - before the end, you were trying to find an unscabbarded sword by feeling for it with your bare feet underwater in the dark, and I was poised on tenterhooks to stop you from bleeding to death if you sliced your own toes off. It did not inspire confidence."

"Yeah, well." Potter had the grace to look embarrassed. "It was a long time ago. I've done a lot of growing since then, and got a bit more sense."

"One would certainly hope so." He realised that Luna was frowning at him, insofar as Luna ever frowned, and that Potter looked sad rather than amusingly angry; and he remembered a painted room, beautifully designed for his comfort and privacy. "I realise that I have - a lot of catching up to do."

Luna smiled happily. "He hasn't really got used to us not being students any more," she remarked to Potter: "especially Neville. I'll leave you two to get acquainted while I make the tea."

After she had wafted out of the room, her chartreuse-coloured robes chiming with little bells and mirrors, Severus looked away, embarrassed. "I'm sorry," he said shortly. "I have to sit." Turning his shoulder to Potter he made an unsteady lunge for the sofa and subsided into the cushions.

"_I'm_ sorry. I'm used to talking to your portrait, I was forgetting that the, the blood loss and - you know - was still very recent for this, um, version of you."

Severus was tempted to make a cutting remark about how little Potter had ever cared about his suffering and injury before, but he had the sense to bite it back. It would be unfair to tax a grown man with his childhood faults of a quarter of a century ago when he seemed - unlike Sirius Black - to have probably outgrown them. Instead: "I, ah, did examine some of the portrait's memories. I am aware, for example, of the existence of Albus Severus...." and couldn't resist adding: "He seems to be an able student, and a credit to Slytherin."

Potter made a little chuffing noise and sat down in the armchair across from Severus. "Ginny had conniptions when he was Sorted - nearly as much as Malfoy did when Scorpius ended up in Hufflepuff." He put his hand up in an absent-minded, abstracted way and pushed a flop of pewter-coloured hair back from his forehead. "I was actually thinking of calling him Severus Albus, but Ginny put her foot down. Said we couldn't condemn the poor kid to going through school with 'SAP' stencilled on his kit."

"Hah, yes. I can see her point."

"I'm sure that he'd like to meet you at some point if - if that's acceptable. He seems to be very taken with your portrait."

"And what a turn-up for the books that must have been."

"I was pleased," Potter said quietly, "when he told me he'd been talking to y- to your portrait. When I was a kid I used to see you as a, a sort of monster, something out of a nightmare, but now I can see that you're just - just this guy who was a friend of my mum's, you know? It's good that, well, that at least somebody in the family can be on good terms with you."

"Luna told me," Severus said cautiously, "that you had me - buried at Godric's Hollow?" and, blast it, he could see the blasted boy's ears prick up at the use of Luna's first name.

"Well, uh, yeah - as near to Mum as I could get you. I thought you'd both want that. Uh, probably."

"You buried me... next to Lily?"

"Well - not next to her exactly: there wasn't a space. But in the next row."

"Parallel or perpendicular? That means, lying in the same direction as her, Potter, or crosswise?"

"I know what it means. Uh - crosswise, I think. Yeah, crosswise."

"So that I could spend eternity lying across her feet like a stone dog on a tomb...."

"Yeah - pretty much."

There was a thoughtful silence, broken only by the distant drumming of the rain. Severus could feel again the cold, shuddering terror he had felt as Nagini struck, the knowledge that his own death was before him: now it was behind him but the terror was somehow still there, sickening and pointless. It took him some time before he was able to force it away and continue with this... whatever it was they were having.

"Your father -" Severus sighed and tipped his head back, letting the cushions buoy him up as if he were floating. "Your father _was_ a monster to me. I realise now that he wasn't the worst bully he could have been - there are bullies who rape, who extort money, who beat their victims bloody almost daily and he did none of those things but he had a, a manic persistence and all-pervasiveness which made my schooldays into one long bloody unending game of run-the-gauntlet. And you - you were a rotten student, you really were, but I was more... disturbed by your faults than I would otherwise have been, in part because your resemblance to your father made me feel that you too were... nightmarish."

"That was nearly an apology, wasn't it?" Potter said in an interested tone. "For what it's worth, I nearly-apologise too. You were a bit of a bastard, but I've been thinking about this for twenty years and I can see now that I was a pain in the bum too, and I shouldn't have treated you as if - well, as if you didn't have any feelings."

"Most people did," Severus replied bitterly. "You were hardly the only one." He drew a deep breath. "Very well. I... nearly accept."

It was at that point that Luna returned, levitating a side-table bearing a teapot and mugs and an assortment of small cakes and sandwiches which Severus (who privately suspected that she had waited in the hall until she heard that he and Potter were "getting along") eyed with caution. He had already learned that Luna's cooking could be as eccentric as Hagrid's and her kipper-and-seaweed paté, in his opinion, tasted altogether too much like what you'd expect kipper-and-seaweed paté to taste like.

"Of course," Potter said around a mouthful of individual goat's-cheese-and-onion flan, "it probably didn't help - with the feeling-I-was-monstrous I mean - that I had a chunk of Voldemort stuck to my forehead."

Severus folded his hands around the warm china of the mug and let his eyes drift shut, listening to the rain. "I suppose," he said remotely, "that we each felt a taint of - of the Dark Lord in the other. I certainly felt that you were - dangerous, potentially even a new Dark Lord and I dont think that it was only my _sensitivity_ to your father. And you may have sensed - or the fragment of Riddle in you may have known - that I was... Marked. That's one good thing to have come from this." Setting the mug down, he shook his sleeve back to show a pale, bare forearm, innocent of anything except the scars of a lifetime's brewing and the momentary, subliminal dapple of flowers.

"I don't suppose that it _helped_," Luna said in a suddenly focused voice, "that we - the other houses, I mean - were all so against Slytherin all the time. I didn't really think about it at the time - and I should have done, because I knew about people ganging up on people - but whenever there was a match, the other three houses always all supported whoever was against Slytherin, and that cant have been very nice."

"It wasn't." He suspected that the comment related to the conversation about the effects of bullying that he had been having with Potter while Luna had been out of the room: proof that she had been listening from the corridor. "It made me feel as if I was still being singled out, bullied, through the medium of my students."

"That's because you were," she said calmly. "Although it probably wasn't personal. And you should eat."

"The worst thing was when Dumbledore took away the House Cup which my house had won - which _I_ had won, through them - and gave it to Potter instead." He took a sip of tea, letting the sweetness revive him a little, and accepted a slice of carrot cake. It seemed like a week ago that he had stood in Ollivander's little shop, trying out wands, and yet it was still only late afternoon of the same day. "I know that we had won it for several years, but to whip it away as soon as Potter came - it was as if James Potter was still jeering at me, taking away what little I had...."

"That wasn't why he did it, though," Harry said. "He did it because he felt guilty about setting me up to probably be killed - not to mention sticking me with the Dursleys for ten years - and he wanted to make my last few years happy ones. Like being nice to a dog you're going to put down soon."

"I was - so angry and distressed, when I found out - I thought we were _protecting_ you! But I think -" He took another sip of tea, frowning. "As I told you, I have examined many of my... my portrait's memories, and it - he - has discussed these things with Dumbledore's portrait, and these conversations are now in my memory too." He was beginning to lose track of what he was saying himself, so Merlin alone knew what it was doing for Potter's cut-price intellect: and even thinking about it was making his inner vision swim, nauseatingly, and try to tell him that he was looking down from a high wall into the Headmaster's office, where Quincy Dobson was having an irate discussion with someone who looked like an accountant. It took an effort of will to wrench his eyes back into his own head.

"Anyway," he went on, gritting his teeth against the sense of dislocation, "I believe now that from the point at which Dumbledore realised that Riddle had used your blood to reconstruct himself, he knew that there was a good chance of your surviving any attempt to kill you. But you had not to know that, because he still needed you to be willing to die - because you might have to anyway, and because from an 'old magic' point of view it might prove to be only your perfect willingness to sacrifice yourself which would give you the power not to need to - and he didn't tell me because... well, you were always suspicious of me, there was always a risk that you would demand to see my memories before you would trust me, or force-feed me Veritaserum beyond even my ability to combat it, especially after the debacle on the Astronomy Tower; not to mention the risk if Riddle were to break through my Occlumantic shields.... So, he sacrificed my peace of mind, such as it was, and my own regard for him in order to improve your chances of survival."

"I'm sorry."

"It was a price I would have been willing to pay, had I been asked - which by its very nature I could not be, of course."

"Uhm, that's - uh, thanks." The former Boy Who Lived (Twice) had gone rather pink: Severus thought that this inarticulate gratitude ought to have made him glad, but instead it left him feeling deathly tired.

"I didn't do it for you, as you must know if you've viewed the memories I gave you. Perhaps I should have."

"Hermione said that - well, that as far as she knew you hadn't taken the memories back yet."

"And Longbottom thinks that my failure to do so is affecting my mental stability, although he didn't put it quite so bluntly." He bit at the cake as though it had affronted him.

"So, uh - why haven't you? If - if it's not too personal to ask."

"I don't know if you've ever taken out a memory, Potter -"

"I've, uh, had memories of mine duplicated by someone at work, while giving evidence, but I've never had one actually removed."

"I didn't have the luxury of such _niceties_, and besides which, I hardly expected to have any future need for them. Tear your memories out by the roots the way I did and what's left... well. I remember enough to know what it is I don't remember, but it's like something read a long time ago in a book - one you weren't very interested in. All the, the colour, intensity, the immediacy is gone. But take them back -" He grimaced, unconsciously making a gesture as if to ward off the chalcedony Pensieve, waiting on its shelf across the room. "Take them back, and you have to review them, relive them - would you be eager to relive -?"

"Not eager, no," Harry said soberly. "But if it gets worse the longer you leave it for...."

"I am only obliged to stay for a year and a day!"

"But if you don't fully settle into yourself," Luna said, "how will you know whether you want to stay longer or not?"

"But it _hurts_," he said, distantly appalled by the childish whine in his own voice, "it will hurt, I don't know if I want to be him...."

"Headmaster Snape was a good man," she said seriously, "I mean not pleasant exactly but like a - a lighthouse. Standing up straight in all weathers, trying to protect us: you should be proud of being him, even if it's not very comfortable. And, well, it was partly so you could sort out what you felt about things and see that you weren't so bad really that we brought you back."

"Do you realise what I -"

"It was all in Skeeter's book," Harry said, "even the - what you did as a Death Eater, which wasn't really all that bad considering, and as for the - the memories, you were a bit of a prat when you were at school, but probably no worse than I was."

"And what a wonderful testimonial _that_ is."

"It's just - being a teenager, isn't it? I can't think of anybody male I was at school with who wasn't a bit of a prat, except maybe Neville. And Skeeter - I know she laid the treacle on with a trowel, and when she wrote about your noble profile and flowing, ebony locks I snorted coffee back down my nose, but she wasn't that far off the mark, was she? If I was a hero, you were at least as much of one."

"I can't - see myself in that light. I was nobody's idea of a Prince Bloody Charming."

"Neither was I - in fact as far as I can make out, most of the great heroes in history have been barking mad. It probably helps, if you think about it. I read somewhere that Orde Wingate - that's a famous Muggle military commander, in case you didn't know - used to comb his pubes with other people's toothbrushes."

"How... delightful of him."

"It's the kind of thing that sticks in your mind - although hopefully not in your teeth. And Godric Gryffindor - he had this _really strange_ exercise regime which is supposed to have proved what a self-denying hero he was, but I suspect he was just a bit loopy. Not that I'm saying that you -"

"I can more easily see myself as 'loopy' as you put it than as a hero, although not the - the toothbrush thing." If he was honest with himself that wasn't entirely true: there was still that streak of dark romanticism, forced down yet irrepressible, which saw himself as a tragic martyr and liked it; but with most of himself he feared that that was only childishness. "At least, if - if I ever had an idea of myself as a hero, what's in that bowl would be a bloody good antidote."

"You don't have to go through it alone if you don't want to," Luna said. "If you like, Harry and I - and the others too, if you wanted - could review it with you and tell you when you're being too hard on yourself."

It was all too much. Past and future were pressing down on him in a smothering weight: part of him snarled "Private, private, mine!" and wanted Potter and his halfwit friends to keep their sticky hands out of his head but the whole bloody world, it seemed, already knew at least the gist of it, and he didn't know whether he wanted to rub their sentimental idiot faces in reality and say "It wasn't like the book, it was all my own stupid, _wicked_ fault," or whether in his heart of hearts he really did hope that they would persuade him that Skeeter had been right.

Formless dark emotion was rising in his chest like a bubble, crushing his lungs, and he opened his mouth and gave a great bark of bitter laughter. "Why not? Why ever bloody not?"

* * *

**Author's note:**

Apologies for the long delay in updating this. This was due in part to computer issues (including an upgrade from Win98 to XP which coincided with a dying hard drive, followed by a dying motherboard); in part to a group of reviews for _Lost and Found_ which urged that Snape should become a torturer like his captors, and which freaked me out so much they put me off fanfiction for several months; and in part to work on a series of essays which examine the likely real-world locations of various places mentioned in the Potter books, such as Grimmauld Place, the cave where the locket was stored and Vernon Dursley's offshore island. These essays can be found at **www. whitehound. co. uk/Fanfic/Location_Location. htm**, and include illustrations so that non-British fen can get an idea of what these scenes would look like.

"Auld lang syne" is of course Scots for "old long-since" - in plain English, "long-ago days". It forms the title and most of the chorus of the famous Burns song about remembering and renewing old friendships (although in fact Burns copied the chorus, including the "Auld lang syne" bit itself, from an older song).

I had originally made the day after the last day of term, the day the students travelled back home on the Hogwarts Express, which was also the day Severus made mind-link with his portrait and the day he and Luna were nearly Kissed by Dementors, Friday 29th June 2018. However, I examined the ending of GoF again and saw that Harry had tea with Hagrid on the last Thursday of the school year and there's no mention of that very day being the last day of term - that seems to be a day or two later. Therefore, I deduced that the last day of the summer term is the last Friday in June and the day they go home is a Saturday, so I went back and changed the date of Severus's meeting with his portrait to Saturday 30th.

The Shrieking Shack must be warded against Apparition, otherwise any enemy could Apparate into it and then use the tunnel to get into the school grounds.

Hagiography is a sort of idealised novelisation of the life of a saint. JK Rowling said at interview that Rita Skeeter would write a biography called _Severus Snape: Scoundrel or Saint?_ We know she wrote one called _Armando Dippet: Master or Moron?_ and we are in no doubt, I think, that in that case the second option was the one she was leaning towards. The implication is that in Snape's biography she would lean towards "saint".

Bind-runes are signs made by overlapping two or more Norse runes so that they share some of their strokes, creating a composite letter. If the original runes are ones believed to have magical, protective powers then the bind-rune combines and reinforces those powers, and the act of designing and drawing it becomes a spell in itself.

"Monstering" is the process whereby low-grade British tabloid newspapers set out deliberately to portray somebody in the worst possible light and twist every fact about them to make them seem monstrous.

"Conniptions" is actually an American word - but it's such a good word that I'm going to assume that Harry knows it. Perhaps he learned it from Dumbledore.

A "turn-up for the books" is an unexpected or improbable event which has nevertheless happened. The "books" in question must be in the sense of a "bookmaker" or "bookie", a person who accepts and pays out on bets on horse-races.

Running the gauntlet is a rite of punishment or of initiation whereby the victim has to sprint down a long path between two rows of tormentors, who try to knock him off course by buffeting him with non-lethal but fairly hard blows as he runs. Traditionally, heavy leather gloves were used for this purpose: hence, "gauntlet".

Kipper-and-seaweed paté - I was actually thinking of the eccentric beers made by the Scottish Heather Ale brewery. Their beers flavoured with heather, elderberries, gooseberries and even pine-needles are all extremely pleasant, but the seaweed one tastes like seaweed.

"Prince Bloody Charming" - the primary meaning of the word "hero" in modern Britain is "rôle model", and I'm sure that that was why JK Rowling initially said that Snape wasn't a hero - she thought she was responding to the question "Is he a good rôle model?" rather than "Did he behave with exceptional courage, competence and self-sacrifice?"


	9. 08 Memories Are Made of This

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**8: MEMORIES ARE MADE OF THIS**

Raising her wing as if to strike at him and shifting her great talons along the board at the foot of the bed, the barn-owl turned her flower face, opened her beak and made a roaring, rushing sound like all the demons in hell exhaling at once.

"There there" Luna said vaguely, holding out her gauntleted wrist for the owl's grip. "I know it's disturbing, but he won't harm you." As Severus clawed his way into wakefulness she smiled at him. "Good morning. I'm sorry if Ermengarde was rude to you, but she can see that your body was made with the same magic as her ancestor's and it scared her."

The owl turned towards her, bobbed irritably and made a rattling noise. "Oh, I apologise," Luna corrected herself serenely. "She was afraid that your... condition meant that Gwydion was back, and might do something nasty to her. It's all right" she added, addressing the owl. "We used Gwydion's spell but it was myself and Bossy-Frizzle and Tall-Flame who cast it: Gwydion is still dead, so far as I know."

"I don't want to know what they call me, do I?" He levered himself up on one elbow, reflecting on what a luxury it was not to have to snap awake, anticipating threat. And he had better make the best of it while he still could, before he was exiled to make way for Luna's twin brats. She, he noted, was wearing sugared-almond-mauve pyjamas and lime-green bunny slippers except that the bunnies, on closer inspection, turned out to be Fwoopers. She showed him the newspaper which the owl had brought. "Mystery Man's missing memory:" shrilled the headline: "the riddle grows".

Severus rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. "Oh, God. Did I really agree to review my memories in Potter's sainted presence?"

"Yes" Luna said, nodding vigorously. "Harry said he'd be round at eleven, so I thought I'd better wake you for breakfast."

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"Are you quite sure you want to do this?"

"No - but that's probably beside the point. Most of my life has consisted of doing things I wasn't sure I wanted to do - and before you read me a lecture about how tragic and pitiable that makes me, if I only did things I was sure I wanted to do I'd spend most of my life in bed, as would most people."

"I'm sure I want to do a lot of things - but not all of them are practicable, of course."

Severus snorted. "I can imagine."

"Don't laugh at me," Luna said severely. "You learned how to fly without a broom and you came back from the dead: that puts you in a poor position to laugh at other people for wanting to do the improbable."

"And I managed to get Potter to do as he was told for once, which is the crown of my achievements - if I'm going to go through with this I want you there," he said in a rush. "Not just Potter."

"That would be nice." She gestured vaguely with a piece of toast and crabapple jam.

"'Nice' doesn't come into it: I want you because I know you won't be biased."

"You think Harry might judge you too harshly?"

He pulled an irritated face. "I don't think he'll judge me harshly _enough _- but whatever you say, I'll know you mean it. You won't pussyfoot around and sugar-coat it."

"You're assuming in advance that an honest opinion will be a harsh one, then?"

"I... yes. No. I want to be able to know that if your opinion isn't harsh, it's because you sincerely think that harshness isn't merited - not because you're being _kind_." He grimaced, hearing himself. "I don't mean -"

"That's all right." She smiled sunnily. "You didn't mean to be rude."

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The Floo had been blocked against incoming messages for the duration, so that they wouldn't be interrupted by any unexpected callers. He had taken what was, he hoped, his last dose of Blood-Replenishing Potion the previous night, but he still felt unpleasantly light-headed as he lowered himself carefully onto the sofa, staring at the chalcedony bowl on the coffee table as if it might attack him. Clouds drifted across the silver surface of memory as if driven by an unknown wind.

Potter flashed him a nervous smile, which Severus did not return. "Shall we, um..."

Severus nodded curtly, not trusting himself to speak. Luna's hand crept into his as the three of them slid forwards onto their knees on the rug, surrounding the Pensieve, and Potter cast the Engorgement charm which would render it wide enough to take their three faces at once. Then he was falling forward, the terrible silver nothingness was rushing towards him like an oncoming train and / he was nine again, hot and dirty again in the ragged, outsize clothes which his mother thought approximated to wizard attire, and his father didn't care enough about to tell her she was making their son a laughing-stock. He wiped his runny nose on his sleeve and peered through the bushes avidly, while the more recent iteration watched himself watching himself and, distractingly, another part of himself seemed to be having an argument with painted-Dumbledore about -

He wrenched his eyes back into his head and was himself, his flower self, watching the little guttersnipe in the bushes, but the memory of what it had felt like to be that boy was still blindingly intense, spooling back into place in his own heart as he reviewed the embodied past. In theory he should, he knew, have been wholly outside the experience, looking at his own history as at a film and unable clearly to connect with the emotion associated with a memory which had been excised and bottled like a diseased appendix: but his re-created, cobbled-together self was raw, incomplete, absorbent and the memory had its hooks in him as soon as he saw it. In the corners of his eyes he could see Potter and Luna on either side of him, solid and yet slightly insubstantial, like Christmas-tree baubles; but now as then his eyes were fixed on the flame-haired girl on the swing, soaring, flying, landing like a dancer.

He could feel the watching child's hunger, too young for desire but wanting beauty, wanting company, wanting another wizard brat he could talk with and not be a freak anymore, who would share his language: wanting - his older self grimaced - someone he could show off to, to whom he could be the wise all-knowing dispenser of knowledge instead of the awkward freak at the back of the classroom, too obviously clever and too ill-mannered and odd-looking ever to be accepted.

Standing again on the scrubby, half-derelict playground, in the shadow of the disused chimney-stack, he saw again Tuney's fussiness and recognised the genuine anxiety and the longing behind it, as Lily held the flower in her hand and forced it to open and shut in a way which his child self thought was marvellous and his adult self felt was both deeply creepy and disturbingly reminiscent of the giant squid. But Lily, Lily was the torch he had followed since he first caught sight of her and the sight of her now burned in his breast like flame. The fire of her hair burned and crackled around her freckled, slightly square-jawed face and he felt, he had felt, that one kind look from her vividly green eyes would transform him into the prince he secretly knew himself to be, and make him invulnerable.

"You _are_. You _are _a witch." As he watched his childhood self trying to build a bridge, floundering, ruining the moment in his clumsy eagerness for contact, being mocked, being rejected, being ridiculous, the old pain and the new pain left him gasping and dizzy: he was floating, falling sideways, and only Luna's hand in his kept him from running after Lily as she strode away from him, scorning him, he wanted to stay forever in a past in which Lily was still alive... Potter's sudden firm grip on his elbow guided him to step back, away, and then he was kneeling on the carpet in Luna's living-room, and the past was dead and lost with Lily somewhere under the silver surface of the bowl.

"You'd better take the memory back now, si- Severus," Potter said quietly. "While it's still fresh. So you don't have to, um, relive it again."

Severus glared at him wildly, gasping as if he had been running. "Maybe I want to - to relive - to see her -"

"I'll draw her for you," Luna said. "Then you can look at her whenever you want. I'll draw her flying. If you like."

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The memory unrolled from the surface of the bowl like a wisp of glittering smoke, following his (Cadwallader's!) wand as he drew it towards his own temple - and then it was there, the overwhelming rush of feeling as he re-felt what it had been to be that boy from the inside. And what was he, after all, but a dead boy who had never grown up?

As he braced his hands against the edge of the table, breathing hard, almost drowning, he knew what Potter had been trying, however ineptly, to say: to have set the bowl aside and waited hours or days before reabsorbing the memory would have been like allowing a wounded limb to stiffen, and then forcing it to move again. Better to get it over with while the wound was fresh and flexible.

Flinching from the memory of Lily's scorn and his own clumsiness, his chest hollow with loss, he felt behind himself for the sofa and tried to lever himself back onto the seat. His muscles felt like spaghetti, limp and stringy, but when Potter took him by the elbow again and gave him a boost he snarled at the younger man like a dog. But he shouldn't, oh, he shouldn't - thanks to his own stupidity, Potter and Tuney and Tuney's muscle-bound oaf of a son and all their dubious spawn were the only fragments of Lily still living and the memory of his painted self reminded him that Albus Severus, at least, was a child any grandmother could be proud of; even one who had died as a shining girl and never known him. And whose fault was that?

"I can't -" He shook his head, not sure what it was he couldn't. This was one single memory, just one, and already the pain of seeing Lily again was overwhelming, he was drowning, choking on loss but he was damned if he was going to cry in front of Potter. It was one thing to let the boy see that he had wept for her in memory, when he hadn't expected to survive to endure her son's pity or his scorn... A movement at his elbow resolved itself into Luna, proffering a mug of hot tea which he made a clumsy grab for and then nursed against his chest, inhaling the sweet-smelling steam. Through the mist he saw that Potter too looked pale and shaken and accepted his own mug almost mechanically, without looking at it, and Severus experienced a pang of empathy at the thwarted hunger in his face, recognisably the same longing he himself had felt as a child, looking at Lily from afar.

Luna, of course, looked no paler or more shaken than usual. Her gaze was slightly detached but calm and warm, accepting him into the circle of her unshakeable placidity: but she too, he thought, would soon send him away. But not, surely not, from dislike: he could hardly complain because she needed his room back for her twin sons, and he trusted that she would be kind.

"Was it from Lily that you learned how to fall without hitting the ground until you were ready?" she asked interestedly, sniffing appreciatively at her own mug, which contained something vaguely purple which smelled of raspberries.

"Um - ah - in a manner of speaking." He was aware that she was deliberately manipulating him better by giving him an intellectual problem to focus on, but he was so used to being manipulated by Dumbledore that he barely resented it. "It was Lily who sparked my interest in flying and gave me a starting point but although, as I told you" - he was re-iterating mainly for Potter's benefit - "I am not able to soar with the kind of powered flight which the - which _Mr Riddle _achieved, still I can glide for long distances with a high degree of control, whereas what Lily did was more - um -"

"More like a parachute jump or a bungee cord, as opposed to a hang-glider," Potter cut in. He still had an unpleasantly ashen blue chin, but his breathing had steadied.

"Yes." Severus nodded jerkily, trying not to flinch from the sight of Lily's vivid eyes in her son's face. In truth he had only a very vague idea what a bungee was, but "hang-glider" seemed fairly self-explanatory - obviously some kind of manned kite. "Well-observed, Potter. She set out to achieve a delayed and softened landing which would enable her to leap from a great height without breaking bones, rather than travelling very far horizontally, so although she was my - my inspiration, in this as in so many things, _A-Loft _is primarily my own work. And don't think," he added, "that just knowing the name will enable you to perform the spell."

"I'm sure it's all in the wrist-action" Potter murmured, with a suggestive leer which left Severus fighting not to blush. "Don't worry - I prefer my own broomstick."

"Well-polished, I'm sure," Severus muttered. He took a swig of tea, still very hot. "You saw, I'm sure, that I was not... prepossessing or of the same, um, social class and she - Lily - she wanted better. Was entitled to better."

"I thought you looked sweet," Luna said happily. "But of course, I always did." Harry snorted and she gave him a brief, penetrating stare. "And the robes were really cool."

"Is _that _what they were?" Harry exclaimed, and Severus favoured him with a reflex glower.

"Of course," he said, rather coldly. "What else should they be?" He took a deep breath. "My mother - she wanted me to be as much of a wizard as I could be without attracting attention."

"She, um - she wasn't really all that familiar with Muggle fashions, was she?"

It had been one of the great dreads of his boyhood, that the elder Potter and his cronies might find out how his mother dressed him when he was at home. Extending gentle feelers of Legilimancy, Severus realised with some surprise that the younger Potter's amusement was more sympathetic than mocking. He pulled a wry face. "Sadly, no, she was not."

"I thought they looked fine," Luna said brightly. "A lot like the ones I used to wear." The two men exchanged shifty eye-contact.

Potter snorted suddenly. "You should have seen the clothes Aunt Petunia was going to send me to the local comprehensive in. She did dye them the right colour grey - so I suppose she wasn't trying to make me look stupid on purpose, any more than your mum was - but they were hand-me-downs from Dudley in his pig-in-a-wig phase, and so much too big I would have looked like a baby rhino. One of those ones with the all-over folds."

"She had a nerve, then, to sneer at me for being - ragged, but she always did give herself airs. But I suppose I - I drove them away, with my... clumsiness."

"Rushing in with both feet - but you weren't to know, I guess, that 'witch' would be taken as an insult and, well, Aunt Tuney's snobbery didn't come out of nowhere. You can see she was already like she was going to be, all that stuff about you coming from the wrong side of the tracks, and my mum..."

"Your mother was good to me, she didn't mind that I was -"

"She overcame her upbringing," Luna said, nodding, "and that's good. But if her sister had been brought up to look down on anybody who wasn't a pure-blood, probably so had she, so I suppose it took her a while to get used to you."

"Yes, 'xactly," Potter said: "I think that my grandparents must have been - well, too like Aunt Petunia for comfort, except that they seem to have accepted magic when it was associated with their _favourite _child. Not that you were much better" he added, with a dour look: "sneering at her for being a Muggle like that."

"She sneered at me first," Severus replied sulkily. "And I didn't mean - if I _had _meant that Muggles were lesser beings would that have been so very terrible, or unexpected? Hagrid says 'Muggle' as if it was the same as 'Flobberworm' and you've never held it against him, have you?"

"That's, um, well..."

"People don't tend to mind what Hagrid says," Luna said brightly, "or to take him seriously, because they think he's a bit - you know. Slow. But really he's just immature - giants mature very slowly, you know - and he was already old enough to know better when Harry met him. I mean, not when Harry met him as a baby, really, but at Hogwarts."

"In human terms" Severus said, "he's probably still only about twenty - but I was ten, and I didn't mean it the way Hagrid means it: at least, I like to think not, although perhaps I'm deceiving myself. I just meant - I think I meant - that she wasn't what I was looking for, she didn't have the skills - "

"Oh - I see." Potter pursed his lips thoughtfully. "Like me when I was at school, not being really interested in anybody I couldn't talk about Quidditch to."

"Yes, except that it was more - more desperate. I was more like - like the only Francophone child in town looking for somebody else who spoke my language, and not being interested in anybody who did not. Plus, of course, I already resented her like hell, because she had humiliated me in front of Lily by pointing out what an unwashed, socially-inferior little guttersnipe I was."

"She's easy to resent," Potter said, nodding.

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After picking over a desultory lunch they gathered around the bowl again, quiet and rather subdued. This time, the rush forwards and down into the past was vertiginous, and Severus had to fight the urge to be sick as he landed on his feet in the smoke-stained, sun-dappled copse where he had been, however briefly, as happy as he would ever be in life. He was aware, dimly, that the other two had come with him but was unable to look aside from the scene in front of him.

He had forgotten that he had ever looked so confident, glowing as he had been then in the glory of Lily's regard, of her presence, as he held forth about Azkaban and its dark guards who had seemed, then, thrillingly Gothic: and he had not known then that he would come to send people who trusted him to be soul-sucked, in a vain attempt to save his shining Lils from the consequences of his own folly. The rolling rrs of the childhood accent they had shared buzzed in the dappled light like bees as the young boy half sat, half flopped against a tree-root in the green shade, looking happy, open...

Or maybe not so open after all; he saw himself assuring her with such confidence that being Muggle-born would make no difference to her power and ability, saw the slight hesitation, the shadow as he avoided mentioning the difference it might make to her social standing because that was not, he thought that it was not, what she had been asking and he didn't want to tarnish this perfect afternoon. And they would be, he had thought, he remembered that he had thought, in Slytherin together, the Muggle-born and the half-blood; they would be students under the Potions master and head of house his mother had told him about, who didn't care what your bloodline was so long as you showed talent and promise and he knew Lily had both and so it would all be all right, Professor Slughorn would see to it that her star shone...

He had not been so open, as it turned out, as to go into the depressing details about his parents' quarrels or the fact that they nearly always ended with one or both of them taking it out on him, but the mere fact that Lily had asked, that she cared, had filled him with a baffled, embarrassed warmth. And she had cared, there and then among the springtime trees, and he had been her friend, her teacher, the dispenser of knowledge, his name in her mouth had been the name of a prince...

Even so, being asked about his parents, having to think about them, had made him tense. As his adult self paced, fretfully, obsessively, around the little tableau, unable to intervene to prevent what he knew was coming, he could see the boy's nervous energy from the outside, the grim set of the shoulders, the hands unconsciously shredding at whatever they held, but he had been so sure, so very sure that when they got to the mythic world of his mother's stories it would all be all right, he would be free and powerful and respected and Lils would be his friend forever and then they had been moving towards some fragile grace, back there in the almost fifty-years-gone past he had nearly, _nearly _managed to tell her how beautiful and glorious she was to him, how far above any fault; in another moment he would have overcome his shyness, his leaf-shredding tension, and then everything would have been different -

And then Petunia had come crashing in, had ruined his one perfect afternoon: the only chance he would ever have, as it had turned out, to tell her sister how he really felt about her. His memory of his time with Lily, of all those meetings whose image was in his head and not out there in a bowl on the table, showed him that he had never again screwed up his courage to the point of telling Lily how beautiful she was: the memory of Tuny's jeering voice, of Lily's anger and his own rage and bitterness and general unworthiness had always risen up between them, until he was a teenager and too awkward and tongue-tied and hormone-addled to stammer it out anyway.

Now, with the benefit of an adult's hindsight and (don't think about it) twenty years of disembodied contemplation in the afterlife, he could see that Tuney had probably been spying on them because she wanted, despite her scornful insistence that none of this was real, to know more about Hogwarts and about magic: he could see that she had always been the plain one, the less favoured one, and now this was another marvellous thing which Lily was to have and she was to be excluded from and she wanted it as earnestly and as hopelessly as he had wanted the train-set in the toyshop window, pressing his nose against the glass to see the engine whirring through the tunnels. But at the time he had seen nothing but her jealousy and possessiveness, she had trampled his fragile romantic awakening into the dust, jeered at him and humiliated him, reminding him of how ridiculous he looked and how ridiculous his mother was, with her total lack of any sartorial common-sense, and in pain and humiliation and the smouldering weight of his own ambiguous feelings about his parents the power had lashed out from him -

He had told Lily that the magical authorities "let you off when you're a kid and you can't help it", but he had not been let off, and no allowance had been made for whether he could have helped it or not.

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Drawn back into the future again, removed once again from a past in which he seemed to be always running after the torch of Lily's hair - her shining hair which was always receding into the distance as he tried to call her back to him - he leaned his cheek awkwardly against the edge of the bowl, breathing deeply. After a moment he felt Luna place her hand lightly on his shoulder.

"Are you feeling unwell?" she asked quietly, and he shook his head.

"Yes - no - bit dizzy" he mumbled, as she fussed a cushion into place behind him so that he could lean back against the base of the sofa, half sitting on the carpet and half sprawled back, as he had been in the wood.

"You sure you're up to this, mate?" Potter asked dubiously, and Severus pulled an irritated face.

"I'm just a bit... blood-pressure's still a bit low." Moving rather jerkily, as in a dream, he extended his wand over the bowl in front of him and scooped up one end of the swirling silver cord which bound him to his childhood's soul.

As the memory entered his mind he felt the fragile, baffled elation of Lily's regard and of his own chance to shine, to be the wise elder brother in her eyes, thrilling both of them with flesh-creeping stories of Azkaban and Dementors which had not yet become a scar burned into his heart. He felt his heart (then and, still, now) contracting in painful, choking anxiety at the thought of his parents' particular combination of rage, bitterness and depression and then in painful hope as he nearly, _nearly _told Lils that that heart beat for her as a lodestone follows its star and then there was Petunia, stamping his hopes into the mud with her patent leather shoes, jeering at him, reminding him that after all he was only dirty and ridiculous, the stupidly-dressed son of a ridiculous mother, and he was certain now, as he had not been then, that pain and rage had lashed out from him and become a weapon as the dry branch cracked like gunshot and fell on her, as he stammered confused denials to Lily and she rejected him, as she walked away from him once more...

Seeing the other two watching him in concern, he gave them a dour, straight-mouthed look. "Please carry on, Mr Potter: I just want to get this - over with."

"If you're sure... Did you know that it was you who dropped the branch on Aunt Petunia? At the time, I mean?"

"I - thought it might have been, but no, I wasn't sure - there was nothing definite to prove it hadn't been Lily, she was better at wandless magic than I was and if it _was _me I didn't know how I'd done it or whether I'd meant to. Or - or how she'd meant the question. I couldn't explain - "

"Mm." Potter gave him a measuring look. "As I recall, that seemed to be a general problem - you not being able to explain things to Mum, I mean."

"Boys need special coaxing to be able to say anything about anything which isn't Quidditch," Luna said brightly, "and Lily was a bit impatient, wasn't she?"

"You don't think that I was - that I was the one at fault here? I must have lashed out - I didn't mean to, that is, I didn't consciously will it, but I must have hated - "

"When I was two years older than you were there I blew up my other Aunt Marge - that's Uncle Vernon's sister - I mean... I _don't _mean that I exploded her, just, um, inflated her, but - same sort of thing. She was a horrible old bat, always going on about beating children and badmouthing my mum and dad and I just - "

"If you have a strong power," Luna said, "like you both have, then the thought can become the deed," and Severus remembered, as in a dream, the staff dining-table disappearing in a cascading shower of porridge and scrambled eggs in front of his horrified twelve-year-old eyes, overlaid with his portrait-self talking sourly to Minerva about the same scene.

"I remember, Lily, just before she and I - she told me that Tuney had left school at sixteen and started working for Vernon and that she - that she couldn't stop talking about him, and what a hard childhood he'd had." He pulled a face. "She thought that it was quite funny, but I think that was just because it was so obvious her sister was smitten and yet she was denying it."

"I suppose that would make sense..." Potter said slowly. "I mean, if his sister was so obsessed with beating children, their parents probably beat them."

"He probably thought," Luna said, "that so long as he wasn't hitting Harry, he was being nice to him. He didn't hit you, did he Harry?"

"Well - not a lot. Boxed my ears occasionally if I didn't duck fast enough, but if I _did _duck he didn't come after me with a belt or anything - nothing like the sort of thing Marge was drivelling on about, so he probably was being nicer to me than his family had been to him."

"Yes," Severus said with a sigh, remembering conversations his portrait had had with Potter and with Longbottom. "If one has - low standards in one's own upbringing, it's hard to adjust to other people's expectations. And I too felt that so long as I wasn't actually hitting the students - which, please remember, was the norm when I started at Hogwarts, as well as at home - then I was doing all that could reasonably be expected of me, and I never expected that the students would take my - my purely verbal tempers so seriously."

"I never did," Luna pointed out.

"She remembered you," Potter said. "Tuney I mean. She told Vernon she'd heard you telling Mum about Dementors - she called you something like 'that awful boy', but there are some people from whom an insult is a compliment. I noticed you didn't actually hit her," he added thoughtfully. "I mean, I know you dropped a branch on her, but that means you didn't throw the power actually at _her _like - well, like I did with Auntie Marge."

"I don't know. Not sure if I - if I turned aside from striking at her directly, or whether I saw the branch as a way _to _strike at her directly. I was just - angry."

"Not angry enough to throw the force straight at her," Harry repeated, and Luna nodded.

"Professor Snape was never physically violent, was he? Verbally, yes, sometimes, but not physically."

"He dragged me away from a Pensieve once," Potter said, "and then threw a jar of cockroaches in my general vicinity: but he was very provoked, and I imagine if he'd wanted to hit me with the jar, he could have done. And he slapped - " He stopped abruptly.

"I slapped your face with a spell," Severus said quietly, "because you had called me a coward, and I - "

"I'm sorry," Harry said. "I realised afterwards that - that that must have burned you, because it was so untrue and the whole - Dumbledore-thing - "

"Was very traumatic, yes." He tilted his head back and shut his eyes. "Even though - even though I knew he had at best a few weeks to live, and we had arranged it in advance in order to prevent the mastery of the Elder Wand from going to Riddle, still it went against every instinct I possessed to actually kill the manipulative old coot and I couldn't - " He tipped his face forward again into his hands, scrubbing tiredly at his eyes as his lank hair swung down like curtains. "I couldn't bear - "

"You should rest," Luna said. "Lionel will be cross with me if I let you tire yourself out. Let me help you up onto the sofa and then you can sleep for a few hours. I'm sure Harry and I will have lots to talk about - I haven't told him all about my expedition to find the giant rat of Sumatra yet, and it was just _so _sweet."

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The words "dear little paws" and "really enormous teeth" drifted through his semi-consciousness, and in his dreaming state he had begun to apply them to himself when a different and more discordant note derailed his train of thought. Half-waking, he froze rigid, literally keeping his head down as the back of the sofa screened him from the heated conversation out in the hall, in which he recognised the voice of Hereward Hawkeye-Whoever. Damn blast and buggery: they had warded the Floo against incoming calls but had forgotten, even him, that the _Prophet_'s finest might simply turn up at the front door, and he supposed fuzzily that he was soon going to have to make up his mind what to say to the press, especially as he would almost certainly be much more vulnerable to their intrusion once he left the shelter of Luna's flat. A ghastly breathing hiss followed by a sharp and unmistakably human yelp suggested that Ermengarde had lent a hand. Or, he supposed, a talon.

After an unknown interval he woke again to hear a child's voice on the far side of the Floo say "Maman" and Luna murmuring in French, something about calling them to let them know that they wouldn't be able to call her from their side for a few hours more, and promising them an expedition to the Welsh dragon reserve in a voice which made him ache shamefully for his own childhood, when a good day had been one in which he didn't get clouted - he supposed he should try to tune her out, not to listen, but he was too Slytherin to turn down information which was offered up on a plate and he heard her say "until the twenty-second, then, Scamander salamanders: that's only twenty days away..."

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"How long was I asleep?"

"About three hours... are you quite sure you want to go on?"

"If you have no other pressing engagements, Potter: I want to get through as much as I can today, at least the - the _early _years." He did not say, although the thought was hammering in his brain, that he would be homeless in less than three weeks and would have to get through all the memories, if he was able to do so, while he still had access to a Pensieve.

He knew that he should raise the matter, that he should discuss with them where else he could go: Potter was, amazingly, an important official now and might even be able to find him a place to stay. But he was reluctant to sound whiny and pathetic in front of Lily's son, and he supposed Horace would probably be able to put him up, at least for a few weeks. He wouldn't have to launch himself into this alien, twenty-years-on world without a guide, or face the hounds of the press without any defence, at least for a little while. And it was not, he realised, as bad as he had feared, letting two former students who - amazingly - he found himself sort-of nearly almost trusting review these memories with him. It was like retroactively having other friends, friends aside from Lily, with whom he could have discussed his situation - even if doing so would simply have given him a forum in which to praise her.

This time it was like falling, a collapse downwards rather than a leap, and he knew he must stay down as long as he could for he would not survive another ascent and descent today, and he did not know when Potter would be free again. He staggered as he landed - not from emotion, no, surely not, but because the weakness of his still-convalescent physical body was reflected in this projected shadow self - and when Luna threaded her fingers through his he accepted the support, briefly, until he had his balance again.

There was his mother, thin and sour in her worn-out robes which had drawn all eyes when they caught the InterCity Muggle train from Lancaster Station to Manchester, where there was a walk-through portal connected to King's Cross: although in retrospect he supposed that the other passengers must have assumed that she was a rather dowdy, left-over hippy, or a nun from some uniquely depressing order. He would have preferred to have gone in the car with Lily, but Tuney's hostility towards him (and his to her, if he were honest) made that difficult and his mother had had an unexpected access of maternal feeling and decided she wanted to see him off on this first day.

He could walk over to Lily and almost, _almost _touch her, could hear it all beginning to go wrong: right on cue there came Tuney's toxic case of sour grapes, sneering at the thing she wanted and couldn't have, and Lily's clumsy attempt at understanding which instead made things far worse, as she revealed how they had seen Tuney's correspondence with Dumbledore...

This time, he refused to surface as the memory fractured and skipped ahead; he stayed with Lily so that her son and Luna had perforce to stay with him and now they were on the train, crowded into the corridor and peering through the glass into the little compartment, watching the cold distaste on Lily's face as she blamed his earlier self for having encouraged her in something which they had both done - and for his failure to understand how important her sister's affection was to her, although with the benefit of hindsight and knowing how that sister had treated Lily's son, he thought that he had been right after all.

With that same hindsight, he could see that he had not understood Lily's need for Tuney's regard because to him it was normal that family members should be at odds; nor had he cared much about her scornful glance, so long as she didn't walk away, because it had seemed normal that even the people he was closest to should treat him as negligible and he had known dimly that he had lost the chance to be anything else to her, that day in the copse when he had failed to tell her his true feelings. And he had been so selfishly happy to be going away at last to his mother's parallel world, away from blows and anger to the place where he would be free and equal, acceptable and accepted; so filled with soaring joy that even Lily's displeasure or her unhappiness could not tarnish it.

And, oh, God, there were Black and the elder Potter there from the outset, the worm in the bud, poised to tell him that he was to be ridiculous and despised here too, that nothing had changed for him or could ever change because he carried his own exile with him but thank God, thank _God _that he had already changed into his new robes, as he followed Lily like the obedient dog he was with the hated nickname "Snivellus" already ringing in his ears, and Potter's foot already there to trip him...

Again, a final time, he held on, he refused to be moved although he could feel both Luna and the younger Potter tugging at him with insubstantial hands as the memory fractured again and jarred forwards, leaping past his settled, internal memory of the train and of his own half-hearted and temporary resistance to the idea of Lily treating him to fourteen different kinds of wizard sweets, of the scarlet engine galloping and snorting like a horse through the gathering dusk, the little station in a vast nowhere and the climb down the narrow path through the close-set pines, which opened onto silvery water lapping at the little beach and the small boats bobbing in the darkness towards the ranks of yellow lights, high up there in the blackness above the cliff as he and Lily clung together, squeaking with excitement...

And then there she was again in the externalised, three-dimensional projection of memory, being Sorted to Gryffindor, going away from him again, going to sit (however reluctantly, at this point) with Black and Potter, with the werewolf who would one day stalk his dreams and soft, flabby little Pettigrew who would betray her to her death, who would be even deadlier to her than he himself had been. And he himself was sent to Lucius, to set his feet on the path which would lead him down dark roads to a bitter death, bleeding out his life on the cold floor of the wolf's house.

This time he had no resistance, no physical reserves; he staggered again and found himself embarrassingly supported in the younger Potter's arms - except that this one was thirty-seven now and the other was only eleven, back there in the past they were stepping away from.

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Collapsing forward against the table, he scooped the three separate threads of memory up almost blindly and shovelled them back into his head, trembling as the remembered emotions jolted through him again and the faint dapple of flowers came and went beneath his skin. In surreal nightmare he saw James Potter again, too close, reaching for him and he jerked his wand up, the new/old wand which projected such killing force, before his attacker could draw his own weapon -

Iron fingers gripped his wrist and removed the wand deftly from his grasp. "Enough!" Harry said firmly, as he scooped the older man up with embarrassing ease and poured him onto the sofa, more or less in a sitting position. "If you do any more tonight you're going to fry your brains, you really are."

"I though'th'ole point wash - " He drew a shuddering breath. "... _point _was that leaving the memories outside my head for much longer might compromise my sanity."

"There's such a thing as going from the sublime to the bloody ridiculous, though," the other man said, tucking the wand back into Severus's robes. "Though I suppose I should be flattered if you mistook me for my Dad - since it must mean that I could still pass for a teenager in a dim light. D'you think you feel any saner?"

"Um..." He felt at the reinstated memories, worrying at them like a sore tooth. Bitterness and loss had settled on his soul like a heavy, sodden cloak but he knew that bitterness and loss belonged there, and the burden was not as bad as he had feared now that he had been able, at least in some part, to view the past more objectively and was no longer quite so alone with it. "Maybe. More, uh, _solid_, anyway. More me, if 'me' is really the right term - "

"Understood."

Luna drifted back in from the kitchen and handed both men a mug of hot chocolate, as if they had been exposed to a Dementor. "Are you up to tackling the inquest, do you think?" she asked as Severus sipped rather unsteadily at the sweet warmth. He nodded curtly.

"That's good," she said gravely. "Only I was wondering why the Hat put you in Slytherin? Not that there's anything wrong with being in Slytherin, but you've never seemed to be especially ambitious."

"I'm horribly competitive, though: I always wanted to win any game and if I wasn't good it burned me, which I suppose is ambition of a sort. But the Hat - the Hat said I could be in any House, that I, uh - 'partake of all their qualities, and so you have to choose', and I chose Slytherin."

"You didn't want to go where Mum was?" Harry asked, and Severus gave him a wild look.

"Of course I - but it would have meant sharing a dorm with P- with your father and Black, and you saw how they were already treating me, how they turned on me from the start because they could see I was _low class _- "

"I didn't think it was that," Luna said. "I thought it was because you were friends with a girl. Boys that age think being a girl is contagious."

"I dunno," Harry said. "I thought Sirius already looked a bit - developed for his age. He was nearly the oldest boy in his year, did you know? And although I think he was probably mostly gay he was probably bi enough to be annoyed that a scrawny little oik like you - sorry - was hanging around with a classy-looking girl like my mum and he wasn't."

"With your father, certainly, sexual jealousy was a factor - when we were older, anyway."

"The Hat wanted to put Harry in Slytherin too, did you know that?" Luna said brightly.

"No. I didn't."

"I dunno if it was really _me_," Harry said, "or - you know, the chunk of Voldemort that I had sticking out of my forehead that it wanted to put into Slytherin, but it said I could do really well there. But - well, same thing, I'd met Draco Malfoy twice already, once in Madame Malkin's and once on the train and he'd done that whole creepy people-like-us thing and sneered at Ron for being poor, and I _really _didn't want to have to spend seven years sharing a dorm with the obnoxious little twat." He frowned. "Plus, of course, Hagrid had told me that there wasn't a witch or wizard who went bad who wasn't a Slyth which, of course, was less than completely bloody honest of him, since he knew one of my dad's Gryff friends had gone to the bad even if he was confused about which one."

Severus sighed. "Draco really felt quite inadequate _vis-à-vis _the Weasleys, you know, because in the pure-bloodedness stakes they outrank the Malfoys by several centuries. And Scorpius and young Albus Severus seem, amazingly, to get along very well."

"Yeah, Al told me. I used to tell him about you and the headmaster I mean the _other _headmaster when he was little, you know: I had to remind him about it when his brother was bullying him about maybe ending up in Slytherin. Especially as they've, um, improved a bit." Seeing Severus's glare, he shrugged slightly. "Well, they have. That puzzled me, I have to say, that you didn't know there might be a problem with Mum Sorting to Slytherin, what with her being a Muggle-born and Slytherin being like - well, like it used to be."

"I didn't really know that much about it - Mum was a Ravenclaw. I think one of her uncles was in Slytherin but I never had much contact with the Princes: they treated me as if I smelled, even when I didn't. That was why... calling myself the Half-Blood Prince, that was my pathetic attempt to rub their noses in the fact that I was still one of them and they were still related to me even though I wasn't 'pure'."

He sighed, foreseeing the next question. "I wanted to be in Slytherin because Mum had told me that the Potions master who was head of Slytherin at Hogwarts was an 'angel', in the theatrical sense you understand; a patron who promoted the careers of talented young potioneers even if they were ugly little brats like me, and who didn't care about blood-status. I didn't know that Horace Slughorn didn't really care about house-allegiance either - that he would have nurtured my talents just the same whatever house I was in - and besides I, I wanted to be sure my house-father would be somebody who cared about my abilities instead of my mixed blood or my shabby clothes."

Harry, he saw, looked dubious. "I always thought he was a bit... he told me that it was 'funny', in the oo-er sense, that a Muggle-born could be a top student."

"Muggle-borns come to Hogwarts with no prior magical education or knowledge, Potter, _years _of study behind the wealthier pure-blood families with their tutors and their libraries: of course it's remarkable. Just as it's remarkable when one reads in the Muggle press about some refugee who arrives from Indonesia without a word of English and goes up to Oxford to read astrophysics two years later - you know they've had to overcome great cultural and linguistic barriers, on top of the actual academic work involved."

"It's quite true, Harry," Luna said, "if you think about it, that Professor Slughorn - he could be quite callous about not taking much interest in people he didn't think had any sort of long-term potential, but family status was only one of a lot of sorts of long-term potential he was interested in. If he thought you had real talent he didn't care what your background was, and even if you came from one of the best families it didn't count if they were Death Eaters - no offence."

"None taken." He was starting to feel a little less light-headed. "Horace had Lils and me both in the Slug Club as soon as he saw what we could do in the lab., and it wasn't his fault that that took me into Lucius's bloody orbit. And he loved Lily: he always wanted her for Slytherin, Muggle-born or not. When she took up with your father, Potter, he told me he didn't think James Potter's crowd were worthy of her. Except the werewolf - he had a little time for Lupin because he did at least work hard, and I suspect now also because he knew what he was and he wanted to collect hair and body fluids off him to use in potions, but he always said that your father and Black 'squandered their considerable God-given talents on self-absorption and hair-gel', and that Pettigrew had 'something of the night' about him."

"He wasn't wrong there," said Harry: "about any of that, if I'm honest." He scowled. "But if you were so right-on about Mum being Muggle-born and you didn't join Slytherin for all the purity rubbish, how come you nearly told Mum that her sister was 'only a Muggle'?"

"Making unjustified assumptions again about what you think you know about me, are we Potter?" Severus said bitterly. "The next words, as far as I recall, were going to be 'snidey little cow', but I had just enough social sense to know that that wasn't going to make your mother feel any warmer towards me."

"She did seem a bit - well, frosty. I mean not just then but - well, in general."

Severus sighed. "Don't make the mistake of thinking that these memories are all there were, or that they are typical. These are the memories which I chose in order to show you where I had gone wrong, what fault I was atoning for, so that you would believe me about the... tactical issues. But I have a head-full of memories of your mother which have never been anywhere other than in my head: memories of her kindness when I - when I was bruised, physically or otherwise; memories of wading in the stream and collecting frogspawn together, and then scaring ourselves silly by convincing each other that it was radioactive because of all the pollution; of making ourselves both sick trying to smoke my Dad's Woodbines..." He glowered, seeing Potter's barely-suppressed grin.

"Irradiated frogspawn is a common cause of frogmen," Luna said gravely. "And was she right," she went on in an interested tone, "to lay the blame on you for looking at her sister's letter?"

"She was upset, understandably so, but - " He found himself reluctant to admit that she had been at fault in any way, yet it was difficult to avoid doing so. "It was her idea to go into her sister's room, she - " He blushed slightly. "Tuney, you understand, she was nearly thirteen and her parents had just bought her a - I think it's called a 'training bra', but she wasn't wearing it all the time - she hardly needed to - and Lily wanted to have a look at it. It was me - it was _I _who then found and opened the letter, but it was for the reasons Lily said. Mostly."

"You were interested in how the Muggle and wizarding postal services could be connected."

"Yes. And I - for all I knew, she could have written to Dumbledore to warn him against me."

"Dumbledore wouldn't have held it against you just because you'd dropped a branch on somebody, when you consider some of the things that _I _did," Harry said.

"Yes, but I did not know that at the time, and besides which you were granted... special allowances which weren't extended to the rest of us."

"Because I was an important pawn and he needed me to be at Hogwarts, yes. Forgive me for saying this but you didn't look... when you were on the train you were all happy to be going, at least until my Dad and Sirius stuck their oar in, but you didn't look all that ecstatic when you were standing on the platform with your mum. You looked - "

"As if I was braced for her to hit me, yes. That sort of learned response - it becomes a habit. That was something..." He leaned his head back against the soft padded back of the sofa and shut his eyes, not to have to look at them. "You would think," he said remotely, "that I would have been jealous of Lily, that I would have envied her for having parents she could stand next to without having to brace herself for a clip round the ear, but I just accepted that in a general sense it was because she didn't deserve to be hit, and I did."

"I envy you, a bit," Harry said. "You got to spend so much more time with my Mum and knew her so much better than I ever did. Even you," he added to Luna. "It must have been absolutely awful losing your mother like that, but at least you knew her long enough to remember her."

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"If," said Luna, spearing a herby meatball with her fork and then twirling it expertly to pick up the spaghetti, "Harry had been Sorted into Slytherin, d'you think you would have felt any differently about him?"

"I -" The past was a dead weight, error upon error piling up to crush him. "He would have been my child then as much as Lily's - as much as _his_. I could have loved him, even if..."

"Even if he had still been as arrogant and, um, chippy and slightly delinquent as he was in Gryffindor?"

"Yes. He would have been _mine_ - which, in fact, would have made my position _vis-à-vis _the Dark Lord even more bloody difficult than it already was, because Riddle would have expected me to make use of my influence over the brat."

"Harry told me once," she said, "that the first time he saw you, at his Sorting Feast, he looked up and saw you at the staff table and then his scar burned like fire and he thought it was coming from you, but really it was because you were talking to Professor Quirrel who had Voldemort under his hat, facing Harry. I never met Professor Quirrel, of course."

"The Dark Lord invaded his soul and made a puppet of him: only the strongest of us could spend so much time near him and not be broken." He did not say that he had been the strongest of all, although the implication hung in the air and he was well aware of it. "I saw the boy, scowling at me with _her _eyes and I assumed that Tuney had raised him to hate me, that she had told him that I had lured her sister into the wizarding community and brought her to her death. It never occurred to me that he was in pain -"

He banged his fist down on the table, suddenly, sharply, making the plates rattle. "All my life, all my life that _creature _has stood in the way, ruining everything. I should never - but he was different then, handsome, plausible, he spoke about the threat from nuclear weapons, that Muggles were going to destroy the world, and I didn't - I should have known what he was."

"You should have known that plausible political demagogues are nearly always up to no good, yes. Like Minister Fudge - everyone thought Daddy's ideas about him were mad but he really _was_involved in a Secret Conspiracy, even if some of the details were a bit off - or at least Madam Umbridge was and he let her. But you were very young, you know, and teenage boys are prone to simplistic politics they haven't really thought out."

"You think that was why most of Riddle's followers were male? I always assumed it was just because he didn't like women - in any sense."

"Girls tend to go through the simplistic politics phase rather younger - about ten or twelve - which is too young even for Mr Riddle. But he certainly does seem to have treated Mrs Lestrange very callously, despite her obvious attachment to him."

"Yes." He wasn't accustomed to thinking of Bellatrix as a victim but he could see, looking back on what was still, for him, the recent past, that the Dark Lord had sneered at her inexplicable passion for him and had subtly - sometimes not so subtly - mocked her in front of the others, and she had accepted his abuse of her like a darker, more contorted and destructive shadow of his own faithfulness to Dumbledore.

Feeling deathly tired, he addressed himself to the spaghetti, hoping that the sense of grey desperation would lift a bit if he got some fuel inside him. He had cleared half his plate in silence when an abrupt, attention-getting movement by Luna caused him to pause, his fork halfway to his lips.

"I've been meaning to talk to you about the arrangements when the boys come" she said delicately, and his stomach knotted up on the instant in choking apprehension so that the food stuck in his mouth, unable to be swallowed. He couldn't look up; he couldn't meet the silver-grey eyes which were watching him with the same detached, measuring regard he had seen a subjective ten months ago, as he condemned her and Longbottom and the Weasley girl to a detention with Hagrid which was really no punishment at all, but more of a covert reward.

"I thought," the inexorable voice went on, "if it was all right with you of course, that the most sensible thing would be for you to sleep and wash at the Three Broomsticks - I'd pay of course - and then come back here for meals and so on. You'll understand, I can't really put the boys up at a pub, even though they'd probably quite enjoy it: at nine they're..."

"Too young to drink alcohol but old enough to try to?" Light-headed with relief, he saw Luna's pale gaze linger on him thoughtfully.

"Yes. And not really old enough to sleep without supervision. But you still need a bit of looking after too, at the moment: we wouldn't abandon you, you know."

"That's... thank you. The Three Brooms would be - an admirable solution." And it would be: sleeping only a few doors up the street, he would still feel a part of this new home, not an exile or a visitor. A strange sensation washed over him, loosening his joints, as it occurred to him that he had, quite unexpectedly, been granted a reprieve.

* * *

**Author's note:**

Angry or frightened barn owls make a terrifying noise which sounds like a special effect for a film about demonic possession.

JK Rowling's own drawing of Harry's parents, glimpsed in the mirror of Erised, shows adult!Lily as short and slightly stocky, with a small bust, a rather square jaw and a thick, fluffy-looking mane of hair.

Although it has become synonymous with "attic", "loft" was originally a dialect word for the sky and things which were near the sky. "Aloft" means "towards the sky" and the loft of a building is the highest or sky floor, the opposite of the ground floor. Since the name of young Sev's spell Langlock has a Norman French rather than a Latin vibe, I thought his flying spell might be Mediaeval-British as well.

Hagrid refers to the Dursleys as "the biggest Muggles I ever laid eyes on" and it's pretty clear he means something more insulting than just "non-magical persons".

In the scene in _The Prince's Tale _where Sev and Lily are talking in the copse near Spinner's End, they are described as "[sitting] facing each other, cross-legged on the ground" and then a few lines later it says that young Sev "struck an oddly impressive figure sprawled in front of [Lily]", with no suggestion that he has changed position. I suspect JK wrote that scene in two lots, days apart, and simply forgot how she'd described their position, but taking that scene as it stands the only way I could think of that Sev could be seated cross-legged and sprawling at the same time was if he was slumped against a tree-trunk.

It is difficult to work out what season that scene is intended to be set in: it's sunny and warm enough for Severus to have taken off his coat, so it's probably not late autumn or winter; there are leaves on the trees, so it's not winter or early spring; and yet there are also fallen leaves on the ground, still intact enough to shred, so it's unlikely to be summer or early autumn. I'm guessing it's an unexpectedly hot day in April, which would fit with Sev expecting to go to Hogwarts fairly soon, and yet not imminently.

The giant rat of Sumatra is mentioned as some sort of mysterious horror in the Sherlock Holmes stories, but the real-life giant rat which was recently found in Papua New Guinea was covered in fluffy grey wool and allowed itself to be picked up and dandled like a pet cat.

I suspect Sirius of being mostly gay, despite his soft porn posters, because there's never any mention of a girlfriend, his primary emotional attachment seems to be to James, and we are told that a girl eyes him up after his OWLs and he doesn't notice, suggesting he has no radar for female attention.

I had originally speculated that Severus and Lily might come from the mill-town area between Salford and Derbyshire, and had credited Severus with the Derbyshire habit of calling his parents Mums and Dads. The recent revelation on Pottermore that Spinner's End is in Cokeworth, which is either a city or the outer suburb of a city, combined with the presence of a Cocker River two and a half miles south of Lancaster and four miles north of Snape Wood Farm, has led me to think of Cokeworth as more probably a(n in our world) non-existent suburb on the Cocker just south of Lancaster, in the vicinity of Galgate. In the 1950s the accent around Lancaster was rhotic, that is, with the r in words like lord and fern noticeably sounded.

_Giving Extras_ was written mainly to amuse my friend John Nettleship, who was Rowling's Chemistry master and the main real-life model for Snape, and whom you can read about at www. whitehound. co. uk/Fanfic/A_true_original. htm. His death from cancer in March 2011 has left the story orphaned, but I eventually decided that it would be a pity not to finish it.


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